Summary
America is no stranger to being the star of the show, especially when that show is filled with absurd, over-the-top action, and riddled with bullet holes, hyperconsumerism, or fast food mascots-turned-cult leaders. Open-world games often use the sprawling and diverse North American country as a backdrop for their stories, but also to roast the ol' United States good, like a steak in a red-hot Texas barbecue.
From nuclear wastelands filled with crumbling patriotism to McCarthy-era alien invasions with all the flavor of 1950s suburbia, these games exaggerate and mock everything, from gun-ho American exceptionalism toWall Street greedand trailer park Americana. Whether through slapstick humor or biting social commentary, these games pull back the curtain on American myths and values while putting players at the center of the show in a way that only interactive media can.
The Fallout series might technically take place in a post-America wasteland, but its ruins are practically built on exaggerated remnants of pre-war patriotism, jingoism, and consumer excess.Fallout 4in particular leans hard into this, as it makes clear with one of its early levels being a rampage through the Museum of Freedom to rescue a self-styled “Minute Man” from bloodthirsty raiders.
From the retrofuturistic commercials that glamorize nuclear war to the crumbling monuments of Boston’s Freedom Trail,Fallout 4paints a world where the American Dream didn’t die but just mutated after the bombs fell. The stars and stripes may have burned away long ago, but the culture the flag represented, which collapsed under its own contradictions long before the super mutants and radroaches claimed the land, still crawls on.
The 1950s in America were a time of paranoia, particularly over two things: reds and aliens.Destroy All Humans!takes all the tropes from the Cold War era and flips them on their head, putting the player in control of a “green” on a mission to harvest human brain stems for their DNA, starting with the unfortunate residents of Tunipseed Farm.
As Crypto the alien, players work through caricatures of the era, including suspicious housewives, square-jawed soldiers, and bumbling federal agents, until they make their way to the highest office in the land, along the way offering a satirical take on everything from suburban conformity andred-baiting hysteriato greasy diners and government conspiracies.
American mall culture is arguably international now, but placing a one-shop temple full of consumable items is distinctly an American invention, as was the association between the walking dead and consumerism, thanks to Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. Capcom’s Dead Rising honors that metaphor while wearing a Servbot helmet, wielding a garden rake, and mowing down a horde of zombies with a lawnmower.
Set in the fictional Willamette Parkview Mall, the game casts players as all-American photojournalist Frank West, who’s “covered wars,” but now mustsurvive an undead outbreakwhile surrounded by an overwhelming abundance of shops, signage, and ironic jingles. The satire is baked into the design: food courts, sale banners, and weaponized consumer goods become tools of survival in a setting where both zombies and people lose their humanity in pursuit of “consumption.”
Set in the fictional Hope County, Montana,Far Cry 5leans hard into the American frontier mythos, filtered through a funhouse hall of mirrors lens of paranoia, patriotism, and private militias. It presents a version of the U.S. where everyone is either armed to the teeth,deep into conspiracy theories, deeply divided politically, or with one foot in their homemade doomsday bunker.
The game’s central antagonist, Joseph Seed, is a televangelist-style cult leader who weaponizes religious freedom, ultra-individualism, and distrust of the government to create his own theocratic empire. While an extremist figure like Seed could emerge on any corner of the planet, it is the uniquely permissive power of the First Amendment (free speech and religious protection) that allows Seed to take root and blossom beyond reproach.
The Saints Row games were already a parody of a parody, butSaints Row 4takes place in another dimension of satire altogether. After the player’s avatar, the Boss, becomes the President of the United States (after stopping a nuclear missile mid-air to the tune of Aerosmith), aliens arrive to take over the world, andSaints 4devolves gloriously into a chaotic fever dream of red-white-and-blue freedom fire.
From a synthetic mind-prison built from 1950s sitcom tropes to Matrix-style cityscapes ofextra-terrestrial oppression, the game gleefully skewers manifest destiny exceptionalism, video game power fantasies, and all-American action movie clichés in a blur of dubstep gunshots, garish character outfit options, and a machine gun of snarky one-liners.
While the series had always been a fond mockery of the U.S.A. way of life,Grand Theft Auto 5drives full-throttle into a world where every billboard, talk radio host, and lifestyle choice drips with post-2008 financial crash American cynicism. Los Santos represents a darker, crazier mirror of Los Angeles, California, or America as a feverish loop of greed, crime, vanity, and grandly delusional self-importance.
Each of the game’s three protagonists represents a fractured slice of the American dream: Michael lives in gated luxury but feels existentially bankrupt. Franklin is young and ambitious, trying to climb the social ladder in a system rigged against him. Trevor is pure id; a nihilistic, hyper-violent redneck who might beGTA’s most chaotic character. What makes the parody sting is that it doesn’t need to stretch the truth far, as the parody feels just plausible enough to be real and familiar.
Set in a Japan-occupied United States in a wacky alternative timeline,Showa American Storypresents an absurd parade ofAmerican stereotypes from a Japanese perspective, as described by an 80s school kid after realizing they forgot to put together a Foreign Cultural Studies presentation and have three minutes to turn it in.
Set to release in late 2025, Showa American Storyis about a girl traveling a country of Katana-wielding greasers, torii-dotted deserts infested with zombies, ruled by an anime-obsessed president. Hilariously, the game has neither American nor Japanese developers, but is the product of a Chinese studio with a seemingly frail grasp on both cultures.
