The Secret World – PC
The MMO The Secret World is hard to categorize. Neither truly sci-fi nor fantasy, it possesses horror and action elements and weaves myths and legends, urban legends and pop culture into an alternative reality.
Have you ever wondered what it would be like if every conspiracy theory, every strange story, and every fear you can imagine were absolutely justified? That is the premise of The Secret World, which recently underwent a reboot as a F2P game, The Secret World Legends.
Players encounter secret societies, zombies, and all things occult. The game world is based on our world but is inspired by H. P. Lovecraft and his Cthulhu mythos or even the stories of Stephen King.
The Secret World is for you if you are into X-Files
The series that comes closest to The Secret World is X-Files. In eleven seasons, science fiction, fantasy, and horror elements are intertwined, all wrapped in a crime-like guise.
Also in X-Files, it’s about conspiracy theories, but these concern a possible connection of high-ranking politicians to aliens, secret medical experiments, and a planned extraterrestrial invasion.
While each season addresses a red thread in the form of the conspiracy to be uncovered, “monster of the week” episodes are interspersed. So, the skeptical agent Scully and the alien-conspiracy-obsessed Mulder frequently encounter mysterious creatures, witches, or people with special abilities.
Why is The Secret World like X-Files?
Both The Secret World and X-Files deal with similar themes and are heavily inspired by myths, monsters, and contemporary pop culture. While the MMO openly embraces all things strange and presents them as real, X-Files tends to be more reserved about providing a final statement about the mysterious occurrences in the series.
While the protagonists seem to get closer to the truth, more breadcrumbs are strewn that cast doubt on the truth of the conspiracy. Thus, in the early seasons, it was common to confirm a suspicion only to refute it a few episodes later – all along the lines of the series motto: “The truth is out there.”
A big theme that The Secret World and X-Files surely have in common: the Cthulhu mythos by H. P. Lovecraft. While the MMO has borrowed the setting from Lovecraft’s works, X-Files employs new characters, which further densify the narrative structure.
