Our favorite game settings

Quest for Glory III
Arguably the worst QFG game as far as gameplay goes, it boasts what is perhaps the best setting of the series. Against the backdrop of tribal warfare in medieval Africa, cultural and racial tensions between what correspond to the great northern empires, plains tribes, and reclusive jungle civilizations play out through the fantasy races of the empire of Liontaurs, the human Simbani tribe, and the reclusive Leapordmen of the jungle. Central to the game are the different meanings that honor can hold in different cultures and societies, and the dire conflicts that can arise when these differences are not properly understood and appreciated.

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Loom
Set in the year 8004, when humanity has risen again from darkness and formed massive guild city-states for the control of knowledge, this revolutionary adventure game focuses on a child cast out from the guild of weavers, who are themselves outcasts – having transcended the weaving of cloth and begun using threads of light and music to directly weave the fabric of reality. Banished to a city-state on a remote island, their society has become more and more introverted, and is fading from glory. When an illicit attempt to use the Great Loom to restore their society to glory goes wrong, the chaos of a grey thread is introduced into the pattern, and the story’s protagonist is created, to grow and eventually attempt to restore order to the fabric of reality. Loom is easily one of the most compelling and creative video game settings ever crafted.

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Silent Hill 2
The town of Silent Hill is one that isn’t easily forgotten. From the thick blanket of fog to the eerie monsters roaming the streets, Silent Hill is where nightmares are born. The town is a mental projection of a troubled mind and was probably best realized in the James Sunderland episode, where a man tries to find his wife who has been dead for the last three years. Things get even weirder when James discovers the town is completely vacant, with a thick fog covering everything. At some points in the game the faint light that illuminates the streets dies out, letting you see only three feet in front of you, and the only ones left in the town to help are even weirder than the monsters that are about. All the little notes you find paint a disturbing picture of years gone passed in Silent Hill, but nothing is explained perfectly. This only makes Silent Hill even more creepy, as fear is created by what we don’t know.