Seven Intriguing Video Game Sewers

Sewers are dark, dangerous, and filled with creepy-crawlies. Although most of us would prefer never to enter their winding tunnels in real life, sewers can serve as intriguing stages for video game adventures. Sewers combine the allure of secret underground tunnels with the chance to study old artifacts that have been thrown away and forgotten. These areas often have a strange beauty as well, with the slow drip and flow of water enhancing the dance of the light reflected on the mossy walls. From forbidden horrors to buried history, these seven video games showcase the potential of a well-designed sewer.

Midgar Sewers, Final Fantasy VII Remake

Final Fantasy VII Remake takes place entirely in the city of Midgar, where Cloud and company explore urban spaces that are vital yet invisible to most people—power plants, landfills, subway tunnels, utility access corridors, and sewers. In the original 1997 release of Final Fantasy VII, the sewer connecting Sector 6 and Sector 7 of Midgar consisted of two small screens. In Remake, the sewers form a sprawling multi-tiered dungeon that’s almost as expansive as the city above.

The Remake developers devoted special care and research into designing the sewers as a multipurpose space employed by the city to store unused construction equipment and outdated municipal property. If you pay attention to the piles of refuse, you can spot all sorts of interesting retro artifacts, from vinyl document binders to fax machines to old post boxes.

The Royal Waterways, Hollow Knight

A common complaint regarding sewer levels holds that the uniformity of their twisting corridors acts as an excuse for developers to create a generic maze with a minimum of effort. If designed with creativity, however, slight variations in an otherwise uniform environment can have a heightened effect, especially if the design of the sewers subtly reflects the layout of the city above.

A perpetual rain falls on the ruined City of Tears in Hollow Knight, and this water flows into the Royal Waterways below. At the edges of the settlement, the sewer channels are falling apart and choked with debris. Directly under the city, however, the rainwater pools into gentle streams whose luminescence casts soft shadows of light onto the darkness of the tunnel walls.

Subterranean Shunning Grounds, Elden Ring

When the Chosen Tarnished first emerges into the Lands Between, they’re greeted by the awe-inspiring sight of the towering Erdtree. Their destination, the Royal Capital of Leyndell, spreads from the base of the great golden tree. The lower reaches of this magnificent city are cut by drainage canals, and a curious Tarnished can venture into the sludge to discover an enormous sewer system filled with high-definition filth, as well as a host of ravenous creatures that feed on muck.

The sewers are as grimy as the city above is beautiful, but the primary fascination of this area is that it just keeps going. If the Tarnished continues to explore, down and down and down, they may discover a terrible secret that the royal family wished to be forgotten. There’s a common urban legend in Japan that a tree will become especially majestic if it’s planted over a grave. What’s in the sewers, then, that would be capable of nurturing the Erdtree?

Kakariko Village Well, Ocarina of Time

With their slime and shadows, sewer levels can easily provide an evocative environment for horror. A perfect example is the “Under the Well” mini-dungeon that lies beneath the picturesque hamlet of Kakariko Village. After the player has grown used to the increased power and mobility of Link’s adult form, Link is forced to return to the body of a child in order to crawl through the narrow passage that connects the bore of the well with the village sewers.

What Link finds in the sewers is ample evidence that these tunnels were once used as torture chambers by the royal family’s assassins. This horror is nowhere more apparent than in the fight with Dead Hand, a pale and monstrous creature with six spindly arms that grasp at Link from underneath a carpet of rotting corpses. I can only imagine how many nightmares this fight inspired in the game’s target audience of children.

Desecrated Cistern, Blasphemous

Blasphemous is set in an apocalyptic nightmare based on the Andalucía region that borders Spain’s southern coast. As in many dry climates around the Mediterranean, the rich culture of the region was historically supported by underground cisterns, artificial caverns constructed to collect and store rain runoff and other sources of water, including water delivered by Moorish and Roman aqueducts. As befitting their importance to the communities above, the architects of the ancient cisterns adorned the pools with majestic columns.

Unfortunately, the cistern that connects the major areas at the beginning of Blasphemous has been desecrated with filth both physical and spiritual, becoming a mire of poison. Its arches and frescoes still retain traces of their former charm, however, and the area’s background music immerses the player in an underground world where every sound echoes across the walls.

Roman Aqueducts, Pentiment

Pentiment, which is set in sixteenth-century Bavaria, was inspired by Umberto Eco’s postmodern murder mystery novel The Name of the Rose, and its story explores the subterranean layers of tension between farmers, aristocrats, and the clergy. When tragedy strikes the monastery on the hill above the village of Tassing, the journeyman book illuminator Andreas is tasked with identifying the culprit. Years later, he returns to the village to find that the murders haven’t stopped.

Andreas searches for clues to the crimes in the Roman ruins that predate the Christian monastery. The church’s catacombs are linked to the old Roman aqueducts, and there are even more ancient ruins beneath that. After a series of adventures in the sewer tunnels, what Andreas and his companions find is a truly gorgeous architectural relic that expands their understanding of history, but it’s up to the player whether to bring this forbidden secret to light.

Path of the Chameleon, Animal Well

Animal Well begins when a flower blooms at the nexus of a vast network of underground tunnels. You play as the small creature that emerges from the blossom, and your job is to explore the labyrinth. Your goal is unclear, but it’s a pleasure simply to get lost. Moss covers the walls, spores drift through the air, and waterfalls cascade through the darkness.

The entirety of Animal Well is one giant sewer level, but the area that many players will explore first, the Path of the Chameleon, is a fitting introduction to the underground ecosystem. Hummingbirds and capybaras watch with interest as your little creature rides a chinchilla above the spiky heads of trundling hedgehogs, all while the ambient sounds of falling water echo across the undergrowth. Even if very few players will plumb the full depths of Animal Well’s sewers, a leisurely stroll through its beautiful pipes and tunnels can be a lovely holiday from the apocalyptic brightness of the outside world.