I'm bored with every PlayStation game and tells the same story
Blog Andrew Joseph 03 Oct , 2025 0
I am a big fan of PlayStation's first-party products. They came to embody the kind of movie adventure I had been looking for while sitting down on the controller in my hand, and it felt like a real sensation. But, this sleek storytelling brand in the past feels like new grounds are being dragged down, and I can’t help feeling that it has become a shabby road lately. Not only all major versions of PlayStation adhere to today's third-person movie style – the stability of the developers seems to have become obsessed with exploring stories of exactly the same theme: grief and revenge. I began to get tired of it. Often, these games are impeccable to making, but when PlayStation is wider and things get more “funny”, I start to miss that era.
Realizing that so many PlayStation games explored the same grim story theme when hit me through Sucker Punch's New Ghost Yotei's New Ghost. Although I love it so much and appreciate its usual exciting fighting method and the real sense of discovery it creates through exploration, I can’t help feeling like I’ve been told its story before. As ATSU, when you hunt down each of “Yotei Six”, your mission is to avenge your parents' death on a bloody trip to Japan in 17th century. Unfortunately, not only does this story come close to the plot of Assassin's Creed Shadow, I also completed it earlier this year, but it's the same combination of Fiery Revenge Arc that has become the hallmark of PlayStation Studios in recent years.
The 2020s Last Part 2 is an obvious trailblazer, with Ellie's dark drop becoming an expression of revenge-filled rage due to the death of her father Joel. Of course, this is a sequel to the original 2013 book, which explores how Joel struggles to deal with the death of his daughter. At the time, the last of us was seen as fueling a wave of “Sad Daddy” games, including 2018’s God of War, but in hindsight, these are the basis for Playstation’s focus on grief.
2022's God of War Ragnarok is a story driven by the loss of a mother and son and the anger that comes with it. Insomniac's Spider-Man series both follow Peter Parker and Miles Morales in an attempt to overcome the threat of super challenge and fight with demons caused by dead parents characters. The return of 2020 is a cyclical science fiction nightmare born from the sad trauma of the protagonist Selene family. Then there is another big PlayStation exclusive in 2025, Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, which may not be a first-party game technically, but certainly a verifiable feast for both mother and father’s pain.
Don't get me wrong: I'm a fan of all the games listed above, each of which is depicted in the description, and each of which provides a very different gaming experience. But when viewed as one as a whole, it is easy to hear their stories all sung from the same hymn. Family grief is at the heart of all these stories, and while I definitely feel that mature themes have a place in the game, it all starts to feel like I’m hit with the same idea at this point. The “violence cycle” is a very real danger, that is, becoming a cycle of reduced returns.
Of course, it's not Each PS5 games follow this mode – Astro Bot is not an exploration of generational trauma in deep space – but you'll find my drift. I think it's my appreciation for the joy and color of the Asobi team for the Old PlayStation team, which is what stood out from my original Dood Morose crowd. It feels like it's rare. But it never did.
PS3 provides us with the unknown age of the naughty dog, and while it eventually ventures into the end of the thief into more melancholy territory, it firmly tugs its flag into the theme of adventure and tear off the tone from the pages of the pulp novel. I will always have a soft spot for Insomniac's resistance and World War II/Sci-Fi war mashups and Littlebigplanet, celebrating creativity and community on the other end of the tone lineage. Yes, these games all contain different levels of character nuance, but fundamentally, these games are all different things: treasure hunts, alien invasions and personal expressions. Not all of them are trying to offer the same story, and I can’t help but feel that if a new Jak and Daxter game was released today, it would be Ottsel’s desire for revenge for his blond friend’s killer.
I hope future PlayStation exclusives can make this inspiration more diverse, interesting past, even if the choice to address more “serious” topics. The PS2 Classic Shadow of Tolossus of the ICO team took a sad tone, but when such ideas are far less common in the game, they find something truly unique and poignant. It has been a unique masterpiece to date, telling its story through changes and minimal cutscenes, which is far from the trademark movie style we now have for PlayStation Games. In the mid-2000s, what we didn’t have were five PS2 releases that considered love and loss exactly and told the same story in different packaging. Whenever you play new content from Sony Studios on your now 25-year-old console, it feels like a whole new experiment, telling a different story, not just a change in the theme.
This brings me back to Yotei's Ghost, a game that outperforms its predecessor in almost every way, forbids its central story. While I have a lot more connection to ATSU than Jin Sakai, the ghosts of Tsushima narrative explore different, fresher grounds. The story balances Kim’s personal struggles in the context of a nation’s invasion, and comes to the chords of honor, betrayal, and stands out in 2020’s Mast the Last Part, and then grief seems to master each Sony Storyteller.
However, Playstation's interest in grief reflects the state of the world. Melancholy is understandable when viewed through lenses from Yotei's Ghost and PS5 exclusives like Death Stranding 2. In 2020 and 2021, a common pandemic undoubtedly occupied our planet, so the themes surrounding unexpected losses and massive trauma will undoubtedly be at the forefront of many ideas. So it would be interesting to see if this pattern would continue to move forward, then, now that the world has (somehow) returned to its pre-existing appearance. In projects that start production after 2022, will these stories reflect different states of the planet, or will they continue to look at our darkest moments? Of course, these are all valid stories, and my reflection on art is a reflection of the person who created it, but I can’t help but hope there is more change.
Considering what will happen next for Sony, there is reason to be hopeful and skeptical. Insomniac's Wolverine looks like all the blood and beheading you'd like to see, but will the mature rating be reflected in its theme? Logan is undoubtedly a character consumed by his desire to avenge. Would we see the familiar path we pass through the super buried past demon, or would we get a completely different story that can be incorporated into another part of his psychology? James Mangold's Logan has told us a story that it makes a great way to get into PlayStation's “Sad Dad” Canon, because X23 dug up the soft side of his King Kong male body, so I hope we don't reread the idea here.
We also know that Saros will be starting from Housemarque in March, and in the recent game stream it is certainly impressive. As for Naughty Dog, it's the zero ground of this long-standing era of sadness, and we know the studio will be close to the sci-fi field with Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet. Its first trailer is promising, more interesting than the tone we've seen since dreaming that the last of us can see. Of course, we barely scratched the surface here, but it's nice to see the naughty dog rediscovering some unknown relief here. By the way, both of these upcoming PS5 games are stories about people investigating people who have lost their world colonies. For my sake, they found that they discovered very different stories, rather than the sad reminder they left behind.
Simon Cardy is a senior editor at IGN who can mostly find feeling desperate in the Open World Olympics, indulging in Korean cinemas, or in Tottenham and the New York Jets. Follow him in Bluesky @cardy.bsky.social.