Exploring the Sacred Mystery in Video Games

For people who are only half familiar with video games, it might be strange to think about this medium in terms of connecting to the Sacred.  

Video games are often associated with vapid entertainment, plastic consoles, fictional violence, and real-life hate spewing in online game spaces and social media. 

But games are an enormous medium – six times bigger than film and music in terms of yearly revenue, with over two billion players worldwide. This space is also evolving and becoming increasingly diverse.  

With the growing availability of tools for game development, building and releasing games has become increasingly easier over the last decade or two. This has meant that it’s also easier for people to get more experimental and expressive with their game development, making it easier to touch the Sacred and the mysterious.   

There is a real compatibility between games and a non-materialist experience of the world. It is striking how many games use metaphors around energy, spirit, and soul to organize their worlds and gameplay.  

This energetic visual and mechanical language works for games and seems intuitive to players. For example, games tend to be dream-like and imaginal, as photorealism is expensive, and making hyperrealistic settings is only interesting for some games. This ethereal visual dimensionality makes the possibilities of essentially walking through spirit worlds feel endless.   

Playing in the Soul Realm  

Take the game Elden Ring, the latest in a series of games by Japanese studio From Software that are considered to be among the best games ever made, with countless awards and nominations ranging from Game of the Year to various categories in art direction, music composition, critics’ choice, and game design. Elden Ring and its famous predecessors, the Dark Souls series and various offshoots, take place in ruinous worlds where time is in flux, and strange deities draw the fates of their inhabitants. They are confusing, humbling, and foreboding experiences. Players start from a sense of disorientation and disempowerment before they slowly learn to understand these game worlds and make progress.  

The research article titled “No mastery without mystery: Dark Souls and the ludic sublime” discusses how Dark Souls elicits awe in its players through this profound disorientation about everything from the rules to the history of the world. There is a sense of endless enigma and depth. I remember hearing one player say that after they left their Christian upbringing, Dark Souls reminded them of the sense of mystery and reverence they used to feel for the Bible.  

I recently recorded a podcast episode with my spiritual teacher, Rosa Lewis, in which we played Elden Ring’s expansion Shadow of the Erdtree. We concluded that a game like this allows people to explore the realm of soul and meaning together.   

There are numerous examples of games that are played in this otherworldly dimension. In Spiritfarer, players guide the spirits of the recently deceased to the afterlife with their boat, getting to know them in the process before having to inevitably say goodbye in a beautiful meditation on death and loss.  

Even more striking is Before Your Eyes, a game where players are the ones being ferried to the land of the dead. Before Your Eyes is a game literally played with our eyes – we see our lives pass before us, and when we blink, our computer camera knows, and our most precious memories are gone. This digital experience melds with soul-deep reflections: What kind of person were you in these memories? What is the story you bring to the afterlife?  This kind of embodied play is very powerful – it had me in tears several times during a runtime of only around two hours.   

A famous and classic play on moving toward death and the afterlife can be found in the game Journey, a wordless expedition across a mythical landscape that charts the history of a people and the end of the gamer’s existence. Sometimes we are joined by another soul (another player), and we travel together without speaking.   

The immersive role-playing game Disco Elysium is about almost everything: societal collapse, ideology, justice, and the complexity of the human psyche. But a sense of numen, and an existential and ineffable depth, pervades the game. A crisis of meaning threatens to devour the world, and an impossible being offers deeply touching reflections on what it means to be human among non-human creatures.  

Everything is a game about…everything. Alan Watts guides players while we explore life from the subatomic level to the scale of galaxies. In Indika, a Russian Orthodox Nun has the Devil by her side on a quest for spiritual meaning. The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood is about a tarot-laying witch living in space who discovers that her relationship with fate is more active than she thought. Even a haunting, existential horror game called Silent Hill 2 — where a town mirrors the regrets and pains of its visitors — is often mentioned for its sense of spiritual depth and arcana of the soul.  

The Sacred and the Dark Night  

Many spiritually resonant games carry an undercurrent of darkness. Confusion, strangeness, and emotional intensity are used to challenge and immerse players. This “dark night of the soul” quality holds absolute power.  

Games are a unique medium because they allow players to take on the roles, experiences, and responsibilities of the characters they play. They also create worlds that people can investigate and explore, quite often breaking the need for linear storytelling. In doing this, they offer genuine potential for personal transformation. 

Gaming becomes visual, digital, experiential imaginings of the Sacred, where we transcend the mundane and feel as though we’re communing with something greater. These games evoke the same themes and reactions as traditional religious or spiritual experiences, such as courage, hope, self-reflection, confronting fears or the unknown, redemption, and interconnectedness.  

The Dark Souls series, for instance, has often been credited by players with helping to lift them out of depression or navigate personal crises. The game offers not just a reflection of darkness and disorientation that may mimic players’ internal worlds, but it also presents paths forward.  

Players form deeply personal, often profound connections to these games. In these contexts, the Sacred is explored and manifests through the full spectrum of our lived experiences: death, impermanence, love and loss, community, connection to nature, synchronicity, temporality, cosmic unity.  

All Will Rise: Where the Sacred Meets Action for a Better World  

Spirituality within gaming is a popular focus, and the medium lends itself well to experiential depth of engagement. But what would it look like to make a game that engages with the Sacred to inform spiritual action in everyday life?   

This is a question we are investigating with All Will Rise, a game about ordinary people taking the powerful to task for destroying the planet. All Will Rise is set in Kerala, South India, in the city of Muziris, which no longer exists in our reality but is vibrantly alive in our game. It’s being created by a dedicated team of game developers, artists, and researchers, bringing experience from some of the world’s best and most popular games, united by a desire to make a real difference through this video game. 

The catalyst was my involvement in a social movement to take a major pension fund to court, which sparked the idea to make a wild, absurd, dynamic game in the line of existing titles, like Ace Attorney, on this topic of planetary justice. We wanted to make a game that shows what it’s like to change the world, one person at a time, through real strategies and actions that work for everyday people in the face of overwhelming power.   

We play Kuyili, an activist and lawyer who has just won a case for personal rights for the river Periyar, based on recognition of its divinity. But now the river is on fire, choked by oil and pollution. Kuyili and her team start a campaign to take those responsible to court for the river’s murder. The game is a combination of role-playing and deck building. Conversations with people in Muziris are card battles where we collect and play evidence, influencing emotions and perspectives to get people on our side, tell the truth, and more. All of it comes together in the courtroom.   

But as time went on in the game development process, we realized that we really wanted to tap into this extraordinary potential of games to engage with the Sacred Mystery of life. Because that’s part of the fight — the oligarchs seeking to empty the planet of its resources are disengaged with our sacred connection to each other and the rich environment that surrounds us. They have forgotten the necessity of our sacred symbiosis. The connection to the Sacred Mystery is what gives people the strength, poetry, soul, and resilience to fight. This is justice through the lens of love.  

So, All Will Rise’s world glows with mystical presence, reverie, and the Sacred for those willing to find it. Kuyili communes with the dead god of the river. Spirit vultures circle the headquarters of the city’s largest corporation. People flourish in sacred places, in dance, and in connection with nature. We see it in the game’s writing, in the cards we play, in the vibrant art, in the energy of the music.   

Making a game is not just telling a story or teaching people a skill. It is an energetic transmission. A game’s meaning doesn’t just stay on the screen; it starts to live in our bodies and transform our experiences. Yes, we hope All Will Rise inspires and excites people with its tactical and strategic opportunities. Yes, we aim to make a difference by funding real-life court cases with the game’s revenue. But beyond that, we hope the game opens a door — a personalized portal into the mystery within our lived experiences. And that a certain spiritual resonance lingers, inspiring their real-world moral imagination and social justice.   

All Will Rise is currently under development, with some exciting milestones on the horizon. Yet even in its earlier stages, the game has struck a chord. An early demo was described by “Paste Magazine” as “the one game to keep an eye on out of Gamescon, the world’s biggest games convention. 

This game is meant to be a trailblazer in its bridge between Sacred Mystery and grounded, collective action by everyday people. The world needs more media, and specifically more games, that dare to reach for both. In the face of apocalyptic fascism and rampant myopic greed, we need spaces that energize us — to imagine, experiment, revel in the joy of life and richness of service and attune to the mystery of being. We need spaces that remind us of our sacred collective existence.  

Soon, we will launch global discussions around the potential of games as portals to mystery and the Sacred. If this resonates, we invite you to take part.  

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By Joost Vervoort, an Associate Professor of Transformative Imagination at the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development, Utrecht University. His work focuses on infrastructures of mystery, collective imaginations, creative sectors (games, music, art), future scenarios, and social movements. He leads a pluralistic meditation group called the Dharmagarage and sings in a black metal band.  

Artwork is from All Will Rise. Credit: Yurvaj Jha.