Today we celebrate International Read a Book Day, and to commemorate it, we have decided to present you with a selection of 7 video games based on novels and books. So, if you enjoyed any of these video games, we invite you to look at the novels inspired by these great titles or read essays about them at the PaperHelp writing service.
The Witcher
This may be the best-known case of those we will list. The Witcher is a saga of medieval fantasy novels by Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski. This saga currently has nine novels, whose popularity was on the rise thanks to the video game trilogy by CD Projekt Red and, more recently, to the Netflix series starring Henry Cavill. The Wild Hunt, the third installment of the video games, concludes with what are one of the best RPGs and an example of how to work when adapting a literary character or literary universe to the world of video games.
Parasite Eve
It is not as well-known as the previous titles, but the video game Parasite Eve, which was released in 1998, is a sequel to Hideaki Sena’s book of the same name, so to understand some of the things that happen in the game it is good to have read the novel. Parasite Eve is a horror fantasy novel in which mitochondria have gained self-awareness and destroy humans with terrible mutations. Like the game, the work stars Aya Brea, a rookie cop who gains psychic powers.
Metro 2033
Metro 2033 by Dmitry Glukhovsky narrates the factional struggle between the last survivors of humanity, who are hiding in the Moscow subway after a nuclear war. The game of the same name adapts the story more or less faithfully, allowing us to experience the horror and claustrophobia by living all the novel’s events in the flesh. This is undoubtedly one of the exponents of dystopian novels. Metro 2033 has a much darker and more adult tone, moving away from the approach of other famous works of the genre, such as The Hunger Games.
Call of Cthulhu
The famous story by H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu, written in 1928, has also inspired many video games, directly or indirectly, such as Bloodborne. The game we are talking about this time is the one that was released in 2018 for PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PC, which is mainly based on the role-playing game of the same name but takes quite a few elements from the stories written by H.P. Lovecraft.
Dante’s Inferno
Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy is one of the most culturally significant literary works, and although not literally, it has inspired one of the most exciting and action-packed games of the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 generation, presented as a hack n’ slash genre game that takes many elements from God of War and Devil May Cry. Dante Alighieri’s work remains a cultural point of reference, and it is no wonder it inspired such a game.
Spec Ops: The Line
Like the movie Apocalypse Now, this game developed by Yager Development is directly inspired by “Heart of Darkness”, the novel Joseph Conrad wrote in 1899. Like its film version, the video game adapts some events and characters in a modern war conflict. Instead of traveling to the Congo in the late nineteenth century, Spec Ops: The Line puts us in the competition in the Middle East, and throughout the story, we will discover that all is not what it seems.
Assassin’s Creed
We don’t expect many to know this, but Ubisoft’s epic historical adventure is rooted in the novel Alamut, written by Vladimir Bartol in 1938. This novel tells us the story of the Hashshashin, a sect of assassins in Islam, a very raw book that takes place during the 11th century. The exciting thing about this work is that the famous eagle jump of Assassin’s Creed is told here, like the creed of the Brotherhood of Assassins that says, “nothing is true, everything is allowed”.
These are just some video games that literature has given us, but we have not included them all for you to tell us in the comments. What other games inspired by books do you remember, and what are your favorites?
