The 9 Best Games to Play If You Can't Get Enough Silo
Overview & Key Takeaways
Silo season 3 was about losing your mind, not just your freedom. These 9 games chase that same fear...if you dare give them a try
Every season of Apple TV+’s postapocalyptic bunker show Silo eventually comes back to the same question: What’s the real reason for keeping thousands of people underground? Season 3 teased this question, then ended without full answers. We don’t yet have a new silo successfully breached or a mystery box (in the form of Silo 1) fully explained. Instead, we’re watching what happens when a population faces a possible memory reset against their will.
Until Season 4 lands, that’s the nightmare Silo’s left us to contemplate: Figuring out how to stay true to who you are when you no longer have your memories…or, preferably, how to avoid full memory deletion (or, perhaps more horrifyingly: memory manipulation) in the first place. If you’re looking for ways to explore that feeling in full while theorizing about Silo 1, these surreal games about mind control and surveillance are ready and waiting. Prepare yourself — each of these is an experience it’d take a lot of Vitamin D+ to forget.
Light spoilers ahead for Silo’s season 3, plus general spoilers for a few games on this list.
1 We Happy Few
Image: Compulsion Games
What’s being taken from you this time? Your own unhappiness. But you have no choice.
Compulsion Games’ 2018 release drops you directly into Wellington Wells, a chipper, retro-British town running on Joy — a government-mandated drug that filters out both memory of recent national atrocities and all associated human unpleasantness. How nice! …Right? At the beginning of We Happy Few, you play as Arthur Hastings, a low-level government censor whose entire job is editing unpleasant history out of old newspapers. That is, until you skip a dose of Joy and start remembering things you probably shouldn’t. You then have a choice: Stop taking Joy, and you become a “Downer” — a pale, twitchy version of yourself, hunted on sight by your smiling, medicated neighbors. Once they clock you as someone who remembers, they’ll cheerfully turn violent. If Silo’s take on chemically enforced compliance had you transfixed, We Happy Few’s brilliant portrayal of mandatory forgetfulness might be almost uncomfortably close to home.
2 Control
What’s being taken from you this time? Your own hands, technically.
Control, a game by Remedy Entertainment, puts you in the shoes of Jesse Faden, the newly appointed Director of the Federal Bureau of Control — an agency that catalogs and contains reality-bending objects inside a shape-shifting New York skyscraper called the Oldest House. That sounds trippy and surreal, and it is…but don’t worry, it’s couched by stifling bureaucracy. Soon, you’ll meet the Hiss, a hive-mind entity that possesses FBC agents, sometimes mid-sentence, turning coworkers you were just talking to into extensions of itself (complete with a stomach-churning, flat, just wrong-sounding voice that inevitably gives them away). Control takes the concept of mass medication and cranks it up to eleven, introducing a system that manages minds and also people and the way they interact.
3 Prey
Image: Arkane Studios/Bethesda Softworks
What’s being taken from you this time? Your memory of this morning. For starters.
Arkane Studios’ 2017 sci-fi horror game puts you in the role of Morgan Yu, waking up for what feels like the first day of a new job aboard the space station Talos I. Soon, you discover that this “first day” has happened many times before, with the memories of each attempt wiped clean by the people managing this experience as a bonafide experiment. There are jumpscares in this game (keep a close eye on every office chair and coffee mug on screen, you’ll thank me later) but the true gut-punch, is realizing that your mind has been treated like disposable lab equipment. What would it be like to wake up as a “reset” Silo resident before slowly realizing that you might not be the first version of yourself? Play Prey and you might find out.
4 Observer
What’s being taken from you this time? Someone else’s memory, this time.
Observer, a 2017 cyberpunk detective game, casts you as Daniel Lazarski, a police “observer” working a case in a decaying Kraków apartment block. Here, Lazarski doesn’t get his memories stolen; instead, he steals other people’s for a living, jacking a probe directly into the brainstems of his suspects and wading through their fractured, glitching recollections to solve crimes from the inside out. This is Silo’s conceit from another angle: Here, you’re not an innocent resident so much as viewing memories from the viewpoint of those in control. Memories, here, are something that can be accessed, edited, and used against a person — or, chillingly, an entire population.
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5 BioShock
What’s being taken from you this time? Your free will, activated by three specific words.
Irrational Games’ 2007 shooter introduces you to Rapture, an underwater utopia where everything is going swimmingly. That is, until the game reveals its actual mechanism of mass control: A mind-control trigger phrase buried in the protagonist’s memory that makes you obey the orders of the person uttering the phrase. When you begin your run, Rapture has already spiraled into surveillance and ideological rot. In the first game, you play as Jack, the sole survivor of a mid-Atlantic plane crash who finds Rapture’s lighthouse entrance and gets talked in by a friendly voice on the radio named Atlas, whose oddly polite requests will feel very different by the end of the game.
6 Beholder
Image: Warm Lamp Games
What’s being taken from you this time? Your neighbor’s trust, one report at a time.
Beholder, a 2016 game from Alawar, makes you the surveillance target’s landlord — not the target yourself, this time. You’re Carl Stein, newly installed superintendent of an apartment block in an unnamed authoritarian state. You’re handed keys to every tenant’s apartment and a government quota of secrets to ferret out and report, with your family’s safety riding on how well you comply. It’s suspicion, but mandated and weaponized as your civic duty. The game is unsettlingly good at helping you rationalize the first few reports you make as totally harmless, if that’s any help.
7 The Forgotten City
Image: Modern Storyteller
What’s being taken from you this time? Everyone’s progress, the moment one person breaks a rule.
Born first as an acclaimed Skyrim mod, later remade as a full standalone release, this 2021 game drops a time-traveling protagonist into a Roman city stuck in a loop under one single law: If any one resident sins, everyone in the city dies. Immediately and simultaneously. And time resets to the loop’s start with no one but you the wiser. Since only you remember everything, this is less about losing your own memory or sense of self. Instead, it’s more about carrying the weight of everyone else’s forgotten mistakes, replaying the same conversations over and over, and trying to find one version of events where nobody breaks the rule. Sounds maddening, eh? Play, if you dare, to find out.
8 Tacoma
Fullbright
What’s being taken from you this time? Nothing, allegedly. ODIN was just listening.
Fullbright’s 2017 follow-up to Gone Home casts you as Amy Ferrier, a contractor sent to recover an abandoned space station’s AI core (named ODIN) before it’s decommissioned. To do this, you walk through a translucent, AR-style recreation of the crew’s final days on board. Nobody on Tacoma is drugged or memory-wiped. The crew just doesn’t know — didn’t know — that ODIN was logging every private conversation, argument, and confession. Brace yourself: The reasons for recording get less comforting the more you listen in. While there aren’t, strictly speaking, informants or chemical memory erasure, here, just a tech system doing what it was meant to do, it’s an arresting reminder of the type of full-blown surveillance the Silo residents suspected but could never quite prove.
9 Fallout
What’s being taken from you this time? Your idea of what your vault was actually for.
This is the popular Silo video game comparison, and it’s not hard to see why. This long-running RPG series explores the ramifications of a decades-long social experiment run by the megacorporation Vault-Tec. In the series, you typically play as a vault dweller slowly realizing that the story you’ve been sold about the world around you is not 100% true. Silo and the Fallout games share a huge amount of DNA, but the mind games in Fallout often are about engineered circumstances rather than unilateral control. Both the vault dwellers and Silo residents are treated like lab mice even as they’re told they’re the bright future the rest of the world is counting on.
Every game on this list agrees on the same rule: Control a population thoroughly enough, and outright violence becomes optional. Drugs, bureaucracy, surveillance, stolen memories, a door that never opens; they’re just different tools built for the same job. Silo has used most of them at least once. When Silo's next season comes out, we'll get some answers. In the meantime, best of luck to any silo resident wondering if their vitamins have tasted a little different lately.
