9 Games to Play After Silo

If Silo has left you thinking about memory, surveillance and populations managed from above, these nine games explore similar ideas through science fiction, horror, mystery and dystopian role-playing.

Spoiler warning: This feature discusses major ideas from Silo season 3 and includes general spoilers for several games.

For readers building a home gaming setup, our arcade machine buying guide can help you choose the right format, while the wider arcade blog covers more gaming history and industry news.

1. We Happy Few

The stolen freedom: The freedom to feel unhappy, remember history and refuse the official mood.

Compulsion Games’ 2018 release is set in Wellington Wells, a bright retro-British town where the authorities require citizens to take Joy. The drug suppresses memories of recent national atrocities and removes the discomfort associated with them. Arthur Hastings begins as a government censor editing unpleasant events from old newspapers, but skipping a dose brings forbidden memories back. Refusing Joy marks him as a “Downer”, making him a target for his smiling, medicated neighbours. It is a sharp match for Silo’s interest in chemically enforced obedience and mandatory forgetfulness.

2. Control

The stolen freedom: Control over your own body and the people around you.

Remedy Entertainment’s Control follows Jesse Faden, the new Director of the Federal Bureau of Control. The agency studies and contains objects that break the rules of reality inside the constantly shifting Oldest House in New York. Jesse soon encounters the Hiss, a hive-mind force capable of possessing FBC workers, sometimes while they are speaking. The result is a disturbing examination of how an organisation can manage minds, relationships and behaviour at once.

3. Prey

The stolen freedom: Your memories of what happened before you woke up.

Arkane Studios’ 2017 science-fiction horror game places Morgan Yu aboard the Talos I space station. Morgan believes this is the first day of a new job, only to discover that the experience has been repeated and previous memories erased by the people running the experiment. Its shapeshifting threats provide scares, but the central horror is the discovery that a person’s mind has been treated as replaceable laboratory equipment. That premise makes Prey especially relevant to anyone wondering whether a reset resident might be living through events for the first time.

4. Observer

The stolen freedom: Someone else’s memories, accessed without permission.

This 2017 cyberpunk detective game stars Daniel Lazarski, a police “observer” investigating a decaying apartment building in Kraków. Rather than having his own memories removed, Lazarski enters other people’s minds and searches through damaged, glitching recollections for evidence. Observer turns memory into a resource that authorities can inspect, manipulate and weaponise, offering a different perspective on the power held by those who control information.

5. BioShock

The stolen freedom: Free will, overridden by a phrase hidden in your past.

Irrational Games’ 2007 shooter takes place in Rapture, an underwater utopia that has collapsed into ideological conflict, surveillance and social decay. As Jack, a survivor of a mid-Atlantic plane crash, you enter the city through its lighthouse and begin following instructions from a radio voice named Atlas. The game’s defining revelation is that a trigger phrase buried in Jack’s memory can compel him to obey. Like Silo, it asks whether apparent choice is meaningful when a system has already shaped the mind making the decision.

6. Beholder

The stolen freedom: Your neighbours’ privacy and, eventually, their trust.

Alawar’s 2016 surveillance game casts you as Carl Stein, the superintendent of an apartment block in an unnamed authoritarian state. The government gives Carl access to every tenant’s home and expects him to collect secrets, with his family’s safety tied to his performance. Beholder is effective because its first reports can seem minor or justifiable before surveillance becomes a routine civic obligation.

7. The Forgotten City

The stolen freedom: Everyone’s progress whenever one person breaks the law.

Originally created as a Skyrim mod and later released as a standalone game, this 2021 mystery sends a time-travelling protagonist to a Roman city trapped under one rule: if any resident sins, everyone dies immediately and the loop restarts. Only the protagonist retains the full history of each attempt. The game is less about personal memory loss than the burden of remembering other people’s failures and repeating conversations until a solution emerges.

8. Tacoma

The stolen freedom: Privacy, even when nobody realises it has been taken.

Fullbright’s 2017 follow-up to Gone Home casts Amy Ferrier as a contractor sent to retrieve the ODIN artificial-intelligence core from an abandoned space station before decommissioning. Amy reconstructs the crew’s final days through an augmented-reality record. The crew was not drugged or subjected to memory erasure; instead, ODIN recorded private conversations, arguments and confessions without their knowledge. The reasons for that monitoring become increasingly troubling, making Tacoma a quietly unsettling surveillance story.

9. Fallout

The stolen freedom: The truth about why your vault exists.

The Fallout series is the most obvious comparison for Silo because both feature sealed communities shaped by long-running social experiments. Vault-Tec’s vaults are presented as humanity’s future, yet players typically uncover evidence that their inhabitants were treated as test subjects. The series’ manipulation is often built into the environment and circumstances rather than imposed through direct mind control, but the result is similar: people discover that the story they were given about their safe underground home is incomplete.

What these games share with Silo

Across these nine games, control takes many forms: medication, bureaucracy, surveillance, stolen memories, engineered environments and doors that remain closed. The common idea is that a population can be managed so thoroughly that violence becomes only one tool among many. Until the next season answers more of Silo’s questions, these games offer plenty of unsettling theories to explore.

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