Gamers recommend the best games for a depressive mood – Elden Ring and Shadow of the Colossus top the list

When life feels heavy, a gamer basically has two contradictory prescriptions, and both work. Either dive headfirst into melancholy, into the fog, the empty ruins, and the lonely hero nobody thanks for anything, or fire up something so goofy and colorful that the brain simply refuses to keep suffering while a jazz choir sings about a rolling ball of trash.

The latest round of this endless debate over the best games for depression started with a Reddit post from a player who admitted he feels lonely, does everything he's supposed to, but gets no appreciation for it, and still has to pick himself up and keep going anyway.

The post came with images straight out of soulslike concept art, a knight standing against a gray wasteland. He also added a caveat that instantly ruled out half the obvious suggestions: he's already finished every FromSoftware game, so recommending Elden Ring was pointless.

The most accurate pick turned out to be Shadow of the Colossus, and it's one of those rare cases where a recommendation nails not the genre but the exact mood. Team Ico's game, directed by Fumito Ueda, launched in 2005 on PS2 and later got a full remake from Bluepoint Games in 2018 on PS4.

The lone Wander rides through the dead Forbidden Lands, where there are no towns, no NPCs, no merchants, just sixteen colossi and a task nobody will ever thank him for.

A few more titles landed in that same pile of gloomy catharsis, each one its own flavor of loneliness and doomed persistence:

• Lies of P from Round8 Studio, a dark fairy tale about Pinocchio in the plague-ridden city of Krat that many rank alongside FromSoftware games, with its DLC getting particular praise

• Mortal Shell from Cold Symmetry, a tighter and far more forgiving soulslike for anyone who finds Elden Ring too much

• Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon, an RPG based on Arthurian legend from Questline that left early access in 2025

• Ender Lilies: Quietus of the Knights, a quiet, sorrowful metroidvania about a girl surrounded by cursed knights

• Red Dead Redemption II and The Witcher 3, where the heroes carry everyone else's problems on their backs and get nothing for it

The other camp argued for the exact opposite approach. Katamari Damacy, where the Prince of All Cosmos rolls up buttons and apples at his father the King's command, eventually working his way up to skyscrapers and clouds by the end, works like a forced factory reset for the brain.

Astro Bot, the Kirby games, the farming sim Fields of Mistria, and Yakuza Kiwami all landed in that same bucket, since the series about Kazuma Kiryu can drag a player from tragedy to karaoke and kiddie-bike races in about five minutes flat.

The strongest response in the whole thread came from someone who listed his own set of diagnoses and thirty-three years of fighting depression, then advised against picking a game that's specifically designed to hurt in a different way.