From Ruined Cities to Ridiculous Chores
Being a dad in a video game can mean so many different things. One minute you're sneaking a teenager past infected monsters in a collapsed city; the next you're an octopus disguised as a suburban father, trying to mow the lawn without anyone noticing your tentacles. Fatherhood in these games is tender, terrifying, and completely absurd, just the way it is in real life. While not every character on this list is a biological parent, they share the same question every parent asks: how far would you go for this kid? Here are 20 games that let you find out.
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1. The Last of Us: Part I
Joel takes the job almost as a formality: smuggle a 14-year-old named Ellie across a ruined, infected United States. What starts as a paycheck turns into something closer to fatherhood, forged through scavenging runs, close calls with hostile survivors, and watching the emotional process of a man in mourning.
2. God of War
Kratos spent centuries as a walking disaster as the Greek God of War. Now he's trying, badly, to raise his son Atreus in the unfamiliar terrain of Norse mythology. You'll fight monsters and gods together, but the real story is a father trying to unlearn violence while teaching his son how to survive it.
3. Octodad: Dadliest Catch
Somewhere between "family comedy" and "physics nightmare" sits Octodad, where you play a smooth-talking octopus passing himself off as an ordinary suburban dad. The controls are deliberately, gloriously clumsy, turning something as simple as mowing the lawn into a slapstick mission to keep your family from realizing their father is, in fact, a cephalopod.
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4. The Forest
Eric LeBlanc survives a plane crash only to find himself stranded on a peninsula crawling with cannibals. This first-person survival horror game has you build shelter, craft tools, and dig into the island's dark underbelly, all while searching for Eric's missing son, Timmy.
5. Who's Your Daddy?!
Few games capture the chaos of parenting quite like this one. Playing the dad means racing around the house trying to keep an infant son from eating cleaning supplies, climbing into the oven, or finding literally any other way to end up in the emergency room.
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6. Silent Hill
Harry Mason is just a writer road-tripping with his adopted daughter Cheryl when their car crashes near a fog-choked town that clearly does not want visitors. Cheryl vanishes almost immediately, and the search that follows takes Harry through some of gaming's most unsettling streets, turning a simple rescue into a disturbing ordeal.
7. Heavy Rain
Heavy Rain splits its story across four playable characters, but Ethan Mars carries its emotional weight. His son Shaun has gone missing, and the hunt for the killer responsible forces Ethan through a string of brutal, high-stakes decisions. Every choice you make lands differently once you remember what, and who, is actually on the line.
8. The Evil Within 2
Detective Sebastian Castellanos has already grieved his daughter Lily once. When he learns she might still be alive, trapped inside a nightmarish simulated world called STEM, he goes back in without hesitation. The game's warped environments and monstrous threats make for a rescue mission that feels personal from the very first frame.
9. Resident Evil Village
Ethan Winters thought the worst was behind him. Then his infant daughter, Rose, is taken, and he's thrown into a nightmarish European village full of monsters, ancient bloodlines, and one enormous, memorable vampire.
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10. Red Dead Redemption
John Marston isn't chasing outlaws for sport. He's doing it because his wife Abigail and son Jack are being held as leverage. That threat hangs over every mile of Red Dead Redemption, turning a Western manhunt into something much more personal.
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11. BioShock 2
Fatherhood gets stranger in the drowned city of Rapture, where you play Subject Delta, an armored Big Daddy bonded to a Little Sister named Eleanor. The connection between them isn't biological, but it drives everything Delta does as he fights his way toward her through the ruins of an underwater utopia.
12. NieR
The 2010 version of NieR follows a middle-aged father pursuing a cure for his daughter Yonah, who's afflicted with a wasting illness called the Black Scrawl. The journey winds through a broken world crawling with Shades, mixing combat, magic, and odd side jobs.
13. Dream Daddy: A Dad Dating Simulator
After the horror and heartbreak of most of this list, Dream Daddy is a welcome change of pace. After building a single dad from scratch, move him to Maple Bay with his teenage daughter Amanda, and navigate dating other dads in the neighborhood, all while making time for the small, warm moments of actually raising a kid.
14. Dadish
Dadish is exactly what it sounds like: a radish who is also a dad. When his kids disappear from the vegetable patch, this cheerful platformer sends him hopping through bright levels and past fast-food-themed enemies to bring his family back together.
15. Fallout 4
The Sole Survivor's story kicks off the moment infant son Shaun is ripped from his arms in Vault 111. Play as the male protagonist, and you're stepping into the role of a father searching a post-apocalyptic Commonwealth for his missing child.
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16. The Walking Dead
Lee Everett never signed up to be anyone's father, but that's exactly what he becomes for Clementine after the world falls apart. The Walking Dead puts the weight of her survival, and her growth into someone who can survive on her own, entirely in your hands. It's one of gaming's most affecting portrayals of a chosen father figure.
17. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
Geralt of Rivia isn't Ciri's biological father, but you'd never know it from how hard he fights for her. The Witcher 3 sends you across war-ravaged kingdoms in search of her, mixing sweeping, high-stakes choices with small, quiet scenes that reveal just how much this monster hunter has come to think of her as his own.
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18. Yakuza 6: The Song of Life
Kazuma Kiryu wants nothing more than a quiet life. Instead, Haruka ends up in a coma, and her infant son Haruto is left without anyone to care for him. Kiryu takes the baby to the sleepy town of Onomichi while he digs for answers, stepping into a protector's role for a child who isn't even his.
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19. Dead Rising 2
Former motocross champion Chuck Greene is stuck in zombie-overrun Fortune City with his daughter Katey, who needs a regular dose of a drug called Zombrex after a zombie bite. Surviving the outbreak means constantly hunting down more of it, proving that even in an apocalypse, dad duties don't take a day off.
20. Dragon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride
Dragon Quest V is unusual in that it lets its story, and its hero, actually grow up. Over the course of the game, the hero goes from child to adult to father of twins, who eventually join the party as full-fledged adventurers. Few games let fatherhood become part of the plot itself rather than just its premise.
