The 9 Best Games to Play If You Can’t Get Enough Silo

Every season of Apple TV+’s post-apocalyptic thriller Silo inevitably circles back to a single, haunting enigma: What is the true motive behind keeping thousands of souls sealed beneath the earth? Season 3 brought viewers to the brink of revelation, only to conclude without a definitive resolution. We are left waiting for a neighboring silo to be successfully penetrated or for the absolute truth of Silo 1 to come to light. Instead, the narrative focuses on the psychological fallout when a society is subjected to a forced, involuntary erasure of its collective history.

Until Season 4 arrives, this is the lingering existential dread Silo leaves in its wake: Discovering how to preserve your authentic self when your recollections have been stripped away—or better yet, how to resist total memory erasure and its even more sinister counterpart, psychological manipulation. If you are eager to channel that tense atmosphere into interactive storytelling while you formulate your own conspiracy theories about Silo 1, these surreal video games centered on surveillance and mind control offer the ideal escape. Brace yourself, because each of these journeys leaves a lasting impression that no amount of daily rations can wash away.

Minor spoilers ahead for Silo Season 3, along with general spoilers for several titles on this list.

1

We Happy Few

What’s being taken from you this time? Your sorrow—though you are given no say in the matter.

Compulsion Games’ 2018 release plunges you straight into Wellington Wells, a deceptively cheerful, retro-futuristic British town sustained by Joy, a government-mandated narcotic that erases both the memory of recent national atrocities and the entirety of human grief. Sounds delightful, doesn’t it? At the onset of We Happy Few, you step into the shoes of Arthur Hastings, a low-ranking censor whose daily routine involves redacting distressing history from antiquated newspapers. That is, until you miss a dose of your medication and begin recalling truths best left buried. You are then faced with a stark ultimatum: Refuse the drug and become a “Downer”—a hollowed-out, erratic outcast hunted relentlessly by your permanently smiling, medicated neighbors. Once they identify you as someone who remembers, their forced cheerfulness quickly morphs into violent hostility. If Silo’s depiction of chemically mandated obedience captivated you, We Happy Few’s brilliant exploration of enforced amnesia will feel unsettlingly close to home.

2

Control

What’s being taken from you this time? Your bodily autonomy, quite literally.

Developed by Remedy Entertainment, Control casts you as Jesse Faden, the newly minted Director of the Federal Bureau of Control—a clandestine government agency tasked with cataloging and containing reality-warping artifacts inside a shifting, labyrinthine New York skyscraper known as the Oldest House. While the premise sounds wonderfully surreal, it is grounded by a crushing layer of bureaucratic red tape. Before long, you encounter the Hiss, a hive-mind entity capable of hijacking Bureau personnel mid-sentence, instantly turning trusted colleagues into hollow vessels for a collective consciousness (complete with an unsettling, monotone cadence that invariably betrays their infection). Control takes the concept of mass subjugation and amplifies it, delivering a masterclass in psychological domination.

3

Prey

What’s being taken from you this time? Your memories of this morning—for starters.

Arkane Studios’ 2017 sci-fi masterpiece places you in the shoes of Morgan Yu, waking up for what appears to be the introductory day of a promising new position aboard the Talos I space station. You soon discover, however, that this “first day” has transpired countless times before, with your recollections systematically wiped clean by the architects of a massive, clandestine experiment. While the game features its fair share of genuine startles (keep a vigilant eye on every office chair and coffee mug you encounter), the true emotional gut punch is realizing your consciousness has been treated as expendable laboratory equipment. Imagine waking up as a “reset” citizen of the Silo, slowly waking up to the horrifying possibility that you might not even be the original iteration of yourself. Playing Prey lets you experience that exact brand of paranoia.

4

Observer

What’s being taken from you this time? Someone else’s recollections, harvested against their will.

Observer, a 2017 cyberpunk detective thriller, casts you as Daniel Lazarski, a specialized police investigator working a case within a decaying Kraków apartment tenement. Here, Lazarski’s mind isn’t the one being plundered; instead, he pries into the minds of others for a living, jacking a neural probe directly into the brainstems of suspects and navigating their fractured, glitching subconsciousness to solve crimes from the inside out. This mirrors Silo’s central premise from a chilling perspective: You aren’t merely an innocent dweller; you are inhabiting the viewpoint of the authorities holding the leash. Memories here are commodities—vulnerable to being accessed, rewritten, and weaponized against an individual or, even worse, an entire populace.

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5

BioShock

What’s being taken from you this time? Your free will, triggered by three innocuous words.

Irrational Games’ seminal 2007 shooter introduces players to Rapture, an underwater utopia where society initially appears to be thriving. That is, until the narrative unveils its ultimate mechanism of behavioral control: A psychological trigger phrase hardwired into the protagonist’s subconscious, compelling absolute obedience to whoever utters it. By the time your journey begins, Rapture has already deteriorated into ideological rot and inescapable surveillance. You play as Jack, the sole survivor of a mid-Atlantic plane crash who stumbles upon Rapture’s lighthouse entrance, guided by a seemingly helpful voice on the radio named Atlas—whose polite, accommodating requests take on a profoundly sinister meaning by the time the credits roll.

6

Beholder

What’s being taken from you this time? Your neighbors’ trust, surrendered one report at a time.

Beholder, a 2016 title from Alawar, positions you not as the target of surveillance, but as the landlord enforcing it. You play as Carl Stein, the newly appointed superintendent of an apartment block within an unnamed totalitarian regime. Armed with master keys to every tenant’s home and a mandatory state quota for uncovering illicit secrets, your family’s safety depends entirely on your compliance. Here, suspicion is institutionalized and reframed as your patriotic duty. The game is terrifyingly adept at making you rationalize your initial betrayals as harmless compromises—if that offers any comfort at all.

7

The Forgotten City

What’s being taken from you this time? Everyone’s progress, the instant a single individual transgresses.

Originally conceived as a celebrated Skyrim mod before being reimagined as a standalone release in 2021, this narrative adventure strands a time-traveling protagonist within a secluded Roman city bound by one absolute decree: If any single citizen commits a sin, every inhabitant dies instantaneously, and time rewinds to the start of the loop with only your memories intact. Because you alone retain past events, the challenge isn’t about losing your own identity; rather, it’s about carrying the burden of everyone else’s forgotten mistakes. You will find yourself replaying identical conversations endlessly, striving to orchestrate a timeline where nobody breaks the sacred rule. Maddening? Absolutely. Step inside if you dare.

8

Tacoma

What’s being taken from you this time? Nothing, ostensibly. ODIN was simply recording everything.

Fullbright’s 2017 follow-up to Gone Home puts you in the role of Amy Ferrier, a specialist dispatched to retrieve an abandoned space station’s artificial intelligence core (named ODIN) prior to its decommissioning. To accomplish this, you navigate translucent, augmented-reality holograms documenting the crew’s final days aboard. No one on Tacoma is subjected to chemical drugging or memory wipes; the crew simply remained unaware—or perhaps willfully ignorant—that ODIN was logging every confidential discussion, debate, and confession. Prepare yourself, because the underlying motives for these recordings become increasingly unsettling the deeper you investigate. While informants and chemical amnesia are absent here, replaced instead by automated corporate surveillance, the game serves as a haunting mirror to the pervasive oversight that Silo citizens always suspected but could never prove.

9

Fallout

What’s being taken from you this time? Your comforting illusions regarding your vault’s true purpose.

This is universally recognized as the ultimate Silo video game parallel, and for good reason. Bethesda’s long-running RPG franchise delves deeply into the consequences of multigenerational social engineering orchestrated by the megacorporation Vault-Tec. Typically stepping into the boots of a vault dweller, you slowly piece together that the utopian narrative you were fed about the outside world is a fabrication. Silo and the Fallout universe share an immense amount of thematic DNA, though Fallout’s psychological experiments often rely on orchestrated social stress rather than absolute centralized control. Whether trapped inside a vault or sealed within a silo, residents are treated as mere laboratory subjects—even while being told they represent humanity’s last great hope.

Every title on this list arrives at a chilling consensus: Exert total enough control over a population, and overt violence becomes entirely optional. Narcotics, suffocating bureaucracy, pervasive surveillance, rewritten histories, and sealed doors are merely interchangeable instruments designed for the exact same function. Silo has employed nearly all of them at some point. When the next chapter of the series finally premieres, we will undoubtedly uncover new truths. Until then, best of luck to any silo resident beginning to suspect their daily supplements taste a little unusual.

Silo season 3 makes a bold pivot that changes the show for the better

Every answer comes with a cost

Source: Polygon