Banished tried to deal with the matters of the terrible winter, but due to the poorly interconnected systems, most of the failings don't come down to the player's fault, but a terrible traffic management system that also relies on things being on the same X level on a map that can measure variances down in micro-fractions. (Rather than simply offer a truly flat map or using a grid proper.)

I don't exactly know what the hell AD 2044 was on about, but the nicest gist is that it completely failed to even illustrate a point.

Bastion, given it's lovely narrator and loud bravery over many themes ultimately boils down to a bravado where ultimately none of the story mattered and it's time to move on.

It is my understanding that the latter day Deus Ex series handles the topics of mechanical augs with all the subtlety of a brick, which is both hilarious and stupid with what fervor and worship they're treated with, given the eventual fate of Mechs in the original Deus Ex: Obsolete and all but ostracised. Maybe don't try to "Aug Lives Matter" in a foregone conclusion story.

Ron Gilbert's The Return of the Return to Monkey Island is a game that ultimately reinforces the weaknesses of his writing. Hating endings, tarnished by about 20 years of cynicism. In a misbegotten attempt to philosophies about the nature of endings and games in general, the audience is given a swift kick to the groin and a small card with "NO REFUNDS" printed on it at the ending.

The recent Pokemon games, in a baffling pull by their creators have twice gone on the theme of some vague energy crisis. Which, I state very bluntly, involves a world of nigh infinite magical creatures, many of whom can spout electricity on a moment's notice. Of course, their stories are the least of issues when their "Once a year" schedule on a team of developers who never learned how to make a 3D pipeline has lead to a massive plummet in quality for the past 6 or so games.

That's just a few examples off the top of my head. Other dishonorable mentions go to when David Cage breathes. I tend not to play games that take themselves too seriously because can anything stand up to Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri?




Bonus!
This one is only here because it's a silly series that takes itself entirely too serious.
In Daggerfall, there's an artifact known as the Numidium. It's basically a giant ancient robot powered by the soul of a man who wants to just die that somehow has the power to warp reality/grant wishes. Ingame, the player chooses a single ending, with most of them being variations on, "And then this great power became greater" with two exceptions. One is to hand it over to the King of Worms who seeks to become a god. The other is to hand it over to the Underking so he can finally kick the bucket.

Latter day games in the series treat it as though, even though many of the endings would be impossible to resolve from each other as though they all occurred at once. somehow.

Are there any games that treat serious topics and succeed?

I find the vast majority of games to be bullshit and any attempt at treating a subject boils down to cheaply mimicing scenes from hollywood movies or plastering the subject all over without having anything deep to say about it. I'd want a writer, not a game team, to make a story about something serious or meaningful.

I think games are also mechanically opposed to telling meaningful stories. Unless the game is mechanically reduced to a walking sim / VN..

Yea... like it is hard to play a game that manages to carefully portray the horrors of war at you while at the same time needs to cater its demand for hard bucks and don't feel entertained throughout the most part of the ride..... you know

Still, i did see a lot of reports about how Senua actually managed to do a good job portraying how life is for those suffering mental issues. At least from the standpoint of someone who's engaged with such a person.

There are games that manage to portray some feeling of depth, by design, trying to create a bond, add some 'hard' choices. Or in a 'frostpunk' manner.

I bet that with the increase of technological prowess, games eventually will get more immersive. or at least have the option of not only priming the .. primordials.

I don't think it's a question of technology at all. Games can be immersive enough already.

It's just that game developers (and I guess most gamers) think that games should be about slaying monsters, killing enemies, grinding XP and gathering loot, doing quests, beating bosses.. IMO that just doesn't mesh well at all with deep and meaningful story telling or "tackling serious problems" in a convincing way.

One of the most touching aspect of movies is undeniably in empathy for characters and their interpersonal relationships, but it is very hard to build that kind of thing when it's reduced to snippets of dialogue between hours of slaughtering mobs. It's difficult to build any real sense of urgency without putting the player on a literal timer, but that will 99% of the time just frustrate the player as they want to take their time to explore their surroundings. So there's obvious impedance mismatch between a story trying to make something sound very important and urgent and the player just running around freely in the world doing whatever they want to ... the other alternative is heavy reliance on strong scripted sequences, but that is also not exactly a gamer favorite.

Of course the ones that push the boundaries on storytelling are the devs who abandon these repetitive and mechanical gameplay elements -- but the result is more like an interactive movie or walking sim. Or a VN with no gameplay at all.

I just don't think traditional gameplay is a good fit for good storytelling. But it certainly doesn't help that game devs aren't exactly geniuses when it comes to writing and worldbuilding.

Gosh I really hope GOG releases more VNs soon :\

First game that comes to mind is A New Beginning, which treats climate change. The plot follows a group of people travelling back in time to avoid an evironmental catastrophe (and the people in the 20th century who have to decide whether to take action because of this warning). Unfortunately, not only they got some of their science plain wrong, but...

SPOILER WARNING

Near the end, it is revealed that the time travellers lied about the events in the future, which doesn't exactly help the message of the game.

END OF SPOILERS Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice makes a great job at depicting mental ullness. In fact, the first person mentioned in the opening credits is their mental health advisor. The game comes with a 20 minute documentary that explains how they researched the topic. The main character suffers from psychosis and the game certainly succeeds at making the player understand what she feels. I highly recommend it.

The Metal Gear series?

While it could be written of as a basic anti war narrative it also goes deep into the fact how badly soldiers are treated even when they put there lives at stake for there country, which Is very rare if not completely ignored by most war themed games.

I don't know if it "floundered" exactly, but Detroit: Become Human has a very heavy-handed story about how androids must be seen as humans too with full human rights, and any other viewpoint is wrong and evil and unacceptable according to the game's ideology.

I find that game has the best storytelling presentation style that I've ever seen in any video game, but yet the story itself is not very good and way too preachy.

Several actually.

Afromentioned Hellblade: Senua's sacrifice.
This war of mine
Witcher 3 What is actually a ''monster'' trailer

---
Re:Topic
The only honorable mention I can think of is the ending of Supreme Commander.

''The Eternal War is over!! We are victorious!!!'' *slight, polite clapping*

Context: A war that has lasted for hundreds of years, has cost the lives of untold billions is finally over. You have won!

Your president gives a speech and the audience claps... just ever so slightly and without any emotion... :'D

Hard disagree. They try, but then have weird antics like Ocelot meowing, the B&B corps, Foxdie, Xof, Skull Face, and actually most of Metal Gear 5 is an intellectual sinkhole. This reminds me of obscure vehicular combat game Gunmetal's ending: You get an Employee of the Week Video, and that's it.

Yeah, Ross's Game Dungeon going through the Deus Ex games covered it pretty well by pointing out that Human Revolution was singularly focused around cyborgs (CYBORGS CYBORGS CYBORGS CYBORGS) and their destiny in the world to the exclusion of pretty much everything else and it comes out flat. I wonder how much of this is due to being a completely different developer with completely different philosophies that are tasked with making a Deus Ex game, but that's a different topic.

It's sort of the problem with a lot of modern sitcom cartoons. (South Park, Family Guy, Latter day Simpsons, et al) where instead of writing to strengths or being funny, they beat a hot button topic that by the time they get to publishing the episodes is either irrelevant, dead, or people have moved to the next hot button topic.

The development of a game has that problem but with a years long delay.

Am I the only one who thinks, the terms "game(s)" and "serious topic(s)" contradict each other from the get-go?

Games are meant to be entertaining.
Serious topics are (usually) far from being entertaining.

So, a game can - per definition - never handle a serious topic (in an appropriate way).

Games that tried that (e.g. "Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice" and "Spec Ops: The Line") are - at their core - still games, and - as such - are still meant to entertain their players...not to "educate" or "enlighten" them.

But the same could be said about movies.

[EDIT]
Atleast in games you have some choice of action.
One reviewer ZeroPunctuation actually stated that he didn't enjoy per se your example of Spec Ops, but it was still among his top 10 games of the year.

How many seconds faster were you ? :|

[EDIT]

Correction. You posted seconds after my original post. My edit took whole 5 minutes.