Darkest moment in gaming you've played.

[Wallcrawler]

For me it's hands down a player initiated train robbery in Red Dead Redemption 2.

The gameplay mechanic in RDR2 that has loot on every dead body is partially to blame here, along with the inexplicable behavior of the NPC passengers in an otherwise exceptionally immersive game.

So RDR2 if you're not cheating can be grindy as hell to make money. One of the fastest ways is to rob the Annesburgh train as it passes into the tunnel heading west. With the train stopped in the tunnel, RDR2'S magically appearing lawmen do not function as they do out in the open, and you can rob the passengers at your leisure once you've killed the few armed guards on the train.

It's very dimly lit if the train has lighting, and pitch black if it doesn't, so the only light source is your lantern or your miners hat, which I prefer.

You then can systematically move passenger to passenger, robbing them of their money, as they sit terrified and begging for their lives.

You can get good money from this, but the aforementioned looting mechanic makes it more profitable to murder the npc after you rob them, as you will loot valuable items to be used in trinket crafting, selling for money, or used as health items.

This mechanic makes every NPC on this train that you're robbing, a liar. You ask for all the money, they say this is it, you kill them and loot as much if not more than they gave you.

So now, this train robbery has evolved into a robbery and mass murder, because you're trying to get the money you need as fast as possible.

The second element that makes this so dark is that the rest of the passengers do not run when the first passenger is robbed and murdered. They react horrified, crying out, begging for their lives, but they don't run.

They just sit and wait for what happened to the first to happen to them.

I remember it being enough that when I saw my girls were watching this, I turned the game off immediately.

I'm not a games make kids into killers type person, as I let my kids play gta 3 with the gore code on, exploding cartoony pixelated heads and giggling all day.

This though, this was actually disturbing. Moving through the dark, robbing them, hearing them beg for mercy and just blowing half their faces off with a sawed off shotgun, and slowly moving through the train looting headless corpses in the dimly lit train, and these character models are pretty detailed.

I was actually not willing to let my kids watch that gameplay.

I've played a lot of crazy things, like Manhunt, Punisher, tge "No Russian" airport slaughter in Call of Duty, none of it ever really move the needle for me to be like oh hell no, my kids shouldn't look at this.

Just something about them begging for mercy and my kids seeing the response to that being pull the trigger, and the passengers never ****ing run.


Like, that sequence could be extremely lessened in dark factor if after you murdered the person you robbed, no items were on the body, and if you did murder someone, the rest of the passengers should instantly run and try to escape the train.

Great game, but you can do some really disturbing things with it.

I'll note for anyone that's never played, the game never makes it an objective to do this. This us just something you can do to get money on your own. In fact, I think if you kill a passenger in the missions to rob trains, the mission will fail.