"And so we return again to the holy void. Some say this is simply our destiny, but I would have you remember always that the void exists, just as surely as you or I. Is nothingness any less a miracle than substance?"
— Sister Miriam Godwinson, "We Must Dissent", Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri
A setting that lacks a background and supporting characters, often in a deliberately jarring fashion. A Beautiful Void will often be exactly what the name implies: beautiful, yet somehow also a wasteland, often with a touch of After the End thrown in for good measure. Typically, the reason why the obviously vibrant world is so deserted and empty will be mysterious, but this may vary depending on medium and plot. Named for Douglas Adams' description of Myst. Stories set in this trope tend to have major philosophical aspects. Often coexists with Ontological Mystery.
Wistfulness is an important factor. Overlaps with Scenery Porn/Gorn.
A similar effect can be used to evoke fear, as well - see Nothing Is Scarier, It's Quiet… Too Quiet, and Ghost City.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- The Bakemonogatari series is nominally an Urban Fantasy set in a modern city. Yet it adheres to this trope in how it presents the characters: a dozen named characters are the only people seen, and the urban landscape is entirely immobile and deserted (except for identical cars passing by). The nearest it comes to acknowledging others is a crowd in episode 14 that is rendered by something resembling pop-up figurines.
- Haibane Renmei: The town of Glie is surrounded by a mysterious wall that no one except the Renmei may pass through, and while there are population centers, much of the town is open countryside or woods.
- Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou: In the setting, large portions of the Japanese islands are partially or completely submerged in the ocean, population centers are widely spread apart, and human contact is infrequent. The overall atmosphere is of quiet, slow decline.
- The beautiful, quiet, and peaceful fungus forests in Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind.
- All the non flashback locations that Rin creates in Shelter, as she is living in a life support machine with her mind linked to a virtual reality generator, so she can create any landscape she wants, only she is the only person in it.
- In Weathering With You, the world above the clouds is a verdant greenland with no other lifeforms present.
Films — Animation
- In WALL•E, Earth is all but abandoned, and until EVE shows up, much of the action consists of the titular robot wandering an empty landscape of trash, dust, and decaying buildings.
Films — Live-Action
- A few of the early scenes of 28 Days Later, with Cillian Murphy wandering the eerily-silent streets of London.
- While The Film of the Book The Quiet Earth is more or less post-apocalyptic, the last five minutes take place somewhere that most definitely isn't our Earth, that is seemingly uninhabited except for the protagonist, whose fate is unclear but awesome. Without spoiling, let's just say that the final theme is entitled Saturn Rising.
- This feeling seems to be evoked in Mary Poppins as Mr Banks walks alone through the deserted, sodden streets of London to the bank even if it's only because it's night-time. Especially to modern viewers for whom London is rarely completely deserted ever. The absence of the Bird Lady is all the starker for it as well. The gorgeous instrumental version of 'Feed the Birds' helps.
- In Everything Everywhere All at Once, one of the Alternate Universes within The Multiverse is one where life never existed. Evelyn and Jobu Tupaki end up going to this universe. The Scenery Porn is astounding, and Jobu Tupaki states that this universe is one she visits to relax while having a conversation with Evelyn, entirely in Color-Coded Speech with no audible voices.
Literature
- In The Giver, all we know about the background is that people got sick of unique differences and pains and got rid of them somehow. And something about infanticide.
- The Locked Tomb: The heart of the Time Abyss God-Emperor's interplanetary empire is Canaan House, a beautiful, island-studded ocean planet that he abandoned over 9000 years ago. The Closed Circle of Gideon the Ninth takes place there in a massive, opulent palace and research facility with no one but the contestants, a highly unusual priest, and a staff of skeleton servants.
The whole place had the look of a picked-at body. But hot damn! What a beautiful corpse.
- A lot of the landscape crossed by the heroes in The Lord of the Rings is breathtakingly beautiful, yet quite uninhabited by anyone. Justified in that they're avoiding civilization to elude Sauron's spies much of the time, and many areas' usual residents have fled the coming war. And according to the Appendices at least the northern half of Middle-Earth (Eriador) never really recovered from the Great Plague and the war against Angmar, with only the Shire, Breeland and Rivendell remaining as significant population centers.
- More Than This takes place in a town with no inhabitants except Seth and later Regine, Tomasz and the Driver, contributing to the eerie, dream-like atmosphere.
- Cittàgazze in The Subtle Knife appears completely uninhabited to Lyra and Will when they first arrive there, but strangely still in operating order, with food not yet spoiled and the electricity still working. Turns out the adults had recently fled en masse from an invasion of the Spectres, for fear of being rendered Empty Shells. The children of the adults do return, as they are temporarily immune to the Spectres.
- The titular location in Unimaa is completely void of life when Eino first finds himself there, with the exception of Frida. Even 100 years later, all but the area around Frida's castle remains uninhabited, and it's revealed she's part of the reason why.
Music
- The song "Storybook Sundown
", alternately titled "Beautiful Nothing". As the author himself described it, "I envisioned being doomed to eternal solitude in an endless void when I made this."
- Cerebrite by Mili describes one of these:
Step on my shoulders
Do you see the new lovely, lonely, empty, heavenly world? - The song Connection by Double Echo is about a desert-like place the singer feels an intimate connection with.
- The song Talk About the Past created by The Wake and covered by Craft Spells, has the lyrics "I believe you always wanted emptiness".
Theater
- In Jasper in Deadland, Elysium is implied to be this. It's given very little description, but it's peaceful enough that Agnes wants to stay there instead of returning to her life in the Living World, to Jasper's surprise.
Video Games
- ANNO: Mutationem: The Halls of Ritual, an atavistic area located within the deepest part of The Consortium's facility. It is fully ambient in silence that takes place across a very large room, detailed in prismatic structures to display what it entails, and filled with artifacts that illuminate the setting to give wondrous phenomena.
- Aquaria: Most of the sea life is either neutral or openly aggressive. The only real companions you meet are Satellite Love Interest Li and any pets you get. Aside from that, most of the world is massive, empty, and incredibly beautiful.
- Arcaea: The dozen or so girls wandering Arcaea’s expansive white world of old architecture are its only living inhabitants, and much of their travel is spent in solitude.
- Coil seems to take place entirely in a Womb Level. Despite a visceral aesthetic, there are no identifiable characters.
- The Crystal Key has a partially known background—an alien empire is annihilating everything in its path, and you're trying to contact the only civilization known to have held out against it even temporarily. However, most of the game essentially fits this, as the people you're looking for have long since vanished except for their Apocalyptic Logs, and enemy soldiers only rarely show up. The aura is quite deliberately a mix of exoticism and quiet menace.
- Dark Souls: This is a running theme in the series. In each title, the world is dying slowly. The only hope is someone like the player character continuing the Age of Fire by offering themselves up as kindling. There are some NPCs around, sometimes in dark dingy dungeons, sometimes just in the middle of nowhere, but generally, it's all empty and dead, save for the undead that are running around. And it is all amazingly gorgeous.
- Destiny 2: Unknown Space, domain of the Nine, consists largely of a vast white desert under a dim blue sky, broken by chaotic, monolithic structures that only vaguely resemble buildings and kinetic sculpture-looking doodads. Aside from the lone Emissary of the Nine, it’s clear that the only living things in the whole place are whatever other players you’ve loaded into the map with. Even the enemies that spawn in some missions are nothing more than the Nine’s sock puppets, created on the spot without a will of their own.
- FEZ largely takes place in these. Although there are a few places outside your hometown with people in them, you can't understand them for the most part.
- The dungeons for the first Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles game. Gorgeous rivers, lakes, forests, and ruins. But the whole world is covered in poisonous gas so there really are just very few people outside of the sheltered towns.
- Flywrench. Glitch ambient music plays in the background and everything is dark and mysterious all around, yet somehow peaceful.
- Homeworld gets extra points for being actually set entirely in space. You never see any planet up close, there are no named characters other than Karan S'jet and Captain Elson, and you never learn how any of the aliens look in person. And even though you can amass a fleet of significant size that ends up in numerous massive battles, individual starfighters are too small to take notice of, and the capital ships are too slow and heavy to do any fancy evasive actions. And since you usually need to have a good overview over the battlespace, all you see of the pitched and dramatic battles is some slight glitter of warships on fire and exploding starfighters, and the occasional flash of an exploding destroyer. The music acknowledges the start of a battle by slightly increasing the pacing.
- This is a logical outcome of Fumito Ueda and his Team Ico's "design by subtraction" philosophy:
- ICO is set in one of these, with supremely beautiful buildings with extremely little to do.
- Shadow of the Colossus has a beautiful, massive world, but except for Colossi, stray shrines with shining lizards and fruit trees are just about the only other things.
- Iron Helix: The entire game takes place onboard the starship Jeremiah Obrian. The interior of the ship looks surprisingly comfy, featuring a lounge, a gym, and several opportunities for stargazing. You are the only living thing onboard since the entire crew was killed by the ship's automated defense drone.
- Every video game ever made by thatgamecompany has this.
- Cloud, although it has a vague story, takes place in the sky, with only some clouds and the occasional view of an island.
- Karmaflow The Rock Opera Video Game flip flops on this depending on the world. The first world seems empty at first, but you encounter animals and later people, but only in an area explicibly said to be the last village remaining due to The Corruption taking over. World 2 is far more of a wasteland, while World 3 is by far the most civilized and populous but interaction is still at minimum. World 4 is the emptiest of them all save for ruins, but only on the surface.
- The Legend of Zelda:
- The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker uses this trope to really sell the story of what happened after the Hero of Time departed Hyrule. The ocean is vast and almost completely uninhabited, except for the small islands scattered throughout the area you spend most of the game exploring, and it's gorgeous. Special mention to the sunken Hyrule Castle which, after the Multi-Mook Melee, is completely empty but is very peaceful.
- The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild takes a similar approach, using the vast and mostly empty wilderness to hammer home that Hyrule after the Great Calamity has been heavily depopulated. This is especially apparent in the Great Plateau sequence at the very beginning. Only a few small groups of enemies, a few birds, and a mysterious old man are alive to join you, all the rest is beautiful scenery and the sound of the breeze, with little in the way of music or even sound effects.
- Lost Ember lets you explore the ruins of an ancient city in the forest. There are some animals around, but no one to really talk to.
- Super Metroid: The opening sees you traverse an otherwise empty area, discover something, then backtrack through the same, now populated, area.
- This is key to the horror of Limbo, where the player has no idea what's going on or what has happened to the world. Since the first part of the game is set in a thick forest, it makes sense that you run into very few people (although the ones you do are murderous kids with spears or something, which makes less sense and is never explained) but then you progress into a factory and a hotel which are utterly abandoned.
- Looming. The game consists entirely of exploring a quiet, lonely wasteland, uncovering the relics of civilizations that have moved on. Also, the player character is about ten pixels tall.
- Manifold Garden: The game's environments are not only massive, but loop upon themselves, and you can see each individual loop echo into the distance to the maximum of your draw distance and beyond. There's no NPCS, no enemies, just you and this limitless expanse.
- Minecraft has an option to remove structures at world generation so you can play in an uninhabited world. Without them, the only sign of other intelligent life was two of the enemies, zombies and skeletons, which are both types of monsters that traditionally used to be people.
- Morpheus runs with this trope. You're exploring a marooned yacht called Herculania that's frozen in Greenland's icy terrain, and inside are ghosts of the guests and crew that populated it. The actual people have either abandoned ship before it ran aground, or were captured and imprisoned inside a machine that holds is subjects in death-like trances. Eventually, you get the chance to use this machine yourself and explore the various dream worlds those people are having, which also are devoid of any signs of life.
- NaissanceE: Angular, stark, brutalist, inhospitable architecture as far as the eye can see. No living inhabitants may be found as Word of God states that the game's visual inspiration is the manga Blame!.
- The Neverhood is a half-sculpted and barely-populated world that consists mainly of eerie ambient stuff in the first-person areas (it's more tuneful in third-person areas and cutscenes) and the sky is a featureless black nothingness, for that extra touch.
- Nexus Clash: Laurentia is the remains of a Shining City dotted with hundreds if not thousands of findable clues both subtle and overt that shed light on what kind of place it was, what sort of civilization lived there, and many events both joyous and tragic that happened throughout its history. By the time the player characters arrive on the scene, its world has already ended and it has been plucked from history by the Powers That Be to serve as a battlefield. Few if any of the people who lived in Laurentia were brought with it, and players can only explore its remains and wonder what it might have become if it hadn't come to an end. St. Germaine from the original Nexus War was handled in a similar way.
- Noctis contains 70 billion stars, all procedurally generated. Precious few have life, and your character is the only sentient being. (The website says that there are other exploration ships around, but it's "fantastically unlikely" that you'll ever meet one - the only time you see another starship is when you activate the emergency distress call when you run out of fuel.) There's no win condition, and no way of losing except against existentialist angst—just exploration, and wonder at the sheer emptiness of it all.
- Conspicuously the case in The Omega Stone, in which you visit some of the world's most famed (and tourist-attracting) ancient monuments, yet there's not a living soul in sight. You only meet four people in the entire game, and only one of them is actually at a monument.
- Paradise Killer takes place on an island in a Pocket Dimension created by psychic immortals, populated by a small army of slave labor, and looks like a bunch of Vaporwave album covers smooshed together. By the time you arrive on the island all the slaves are gone but you can still see remnants of their lives, like decorated apartments, convenience stores, and full wheelbarrows just left out in the open.
- The Path, wandering through a melancholy forest accompanied by sad and ambient music really defines this trope, but this Beautiful Void can quickly turn scary.
- Portal:
- Portal: Just you and a lying computer voice in a starkly-designed testing centre, with windows to empty offices and implications that something really went wrong.
- Portal 2 adds precisely one more major character to the cast, not counting the three personality spheres that show up only for the last chapter, and not counting the long-deceased Cave Johnson, who shows up only in pre-recorded messages. Plus there's the heavy implications that the game, set an unknown (but probably very long) time after its predecessor, takes place After the End, which was really plausible in the first game, as Portal is set in the Half-Life universe and as such would be affected by the Combine invasion of Earth - however, the ending of Portal 2 shows Earth with normal shorelines (the Combine drained the oceans) and after exiting Aperture, Chell emerges into a crop field, so perhaps some civilization survived in the USA.
- A common theme with the Prince of Persia games, featuring vast sprawling locales and a cast that rarely exceeds three:
- Aside from the sand monsters, very much present in Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time with the vast castle grounds you explore and trek through with the Prince, Farah, and the Vizier at the end.
- Present in Warrior Within with the Prince, Kaileena, and the Dahaka on the Island of Time.
- Prince of Persia (2008), letting you explore the lands of Ormazd with just the Prince, Elika, and whatever boss is in the area.
- Proteus. You start off near the shore of a vibrantly coloured island that generates itself as you go. The only thing there is the wildlife, and the only sign of human life on the island is a cabin that may or may not even appear in your playthrough.
- RiME: A nameless protagonist lands on an eerie, beautiful island full of ruins and some animals. And that's all.
- In Schizm: Mysterious Journey, you're exploring a Ghost Planet whose civilization vanished quickly and mysteriously, as did the entire research team you were supposed to be delivering supplies to. The only remaining signs of life are the audio diaries left by the scientists.
- Scratches is set in an painfully-detailed empty Victorian mansion with lots of art pieces.
- Secrets of Rætikon, at least in the sense that nature has been left to its own devices, allowing a multitude of plants and animals to thrive among the various dormant machines.
- In The Spectrum Retreat, apart from you, the only "people" at the entire, five floor high hotel are the six or seven robotic staff members, whom you don't see for most of the game. As the manager reveals, that's because Alex rejected the simulation when it was filled with AI guests, so it's been restarted empty.
- Spirit of the North, aside from the player fox and its companion, is completely devoid of all other animal life, and all the humans are long dead. The landscape, based off of Iceland, is beautiful, but treeless and full of ruins. It's up to you to find out why and set things right.
- Spyro the Dragon is made of this trope. There's a lot of enemies, but once you clear them there's nothing but beautiful void left.
- In The Stanley Parable, all of Stanley's co-workers have mysteriously vanished, and his boss is also absent, leaving nothing better to do than to explore the Building of Adventure and discover its uncanny secrets. Interaction with the game world is mostly limited to pressing various kinds of buttons, a fact subjected to much Lampshade Hanging in some of the routes.
- Submachine. You don't know what happened to the people who used the Submachine network before you found it (Murtagh is still around somewhere, but there used to be teams at some of these places). You don't know why many of these buildings have been buried. And you don't even really know where anywhere is, because you travel everywhere by teleporter. (At the end of The Root and beginning of The Edge you seem to be travelling through a literal void.)
- Super Mario Bros.:
- Paper Mario:
- Paper Mario 64: Shooting Star Summit. There aren't any enemies, merely the falling stars accompanied by the calm night sky.
- Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door: The Riddle Tower's plaza is founded in a quiet center with a small river encompassing it, and accompanied by the sounds of moving streams.
- Paper Mario:
- Timelapse involves traveling to many "past" civilizations, all of which are now devoid of human life (except for occasional obstacle puzzles, such as the Amazon crocodile or the killer robot patrolling Atlantis).
- Trace, being a Room Escape Game, or a bungalow-on-another-planet escape game. You never learn why you're in the bungalow on another planet in the first place, the only life there besides you is plants, and, despite there being books and a computer to play with, you never learn anything about whoever lives (lived?) there.
- In The Unfinished Swan, the world starts off as an absolute void, and begins to fill up with detail as you shoot out ink around you. There are still no other creatures around, however.
- Valley has a valley full of wildlife and ruins, but no one to talk to.
- The island of The Witness is filled with a diverse array of environments and buildings of both ancient and modern design, but no humans other than yourself. All you really get are audio recordings scattered about the place that give you bits and pieces of backstory. It should come as no surprise that Jonathan Blow intended the game to be a Genre Throwback to old Adventure Games from The '90s such as Myst.
- On the whole, Yume Nikki's quiet dreamscapes tend to be rather more bizarre and unsettling than beautiful, but they certainly capture the spirit of this trope.
Web Animation
- Draw with Me takes place in one of these, though it's implied that there is civilization in the area that we never see.
Web Comics
- The world that Blue Moon Blossom takes place in is drawn in a simple, minimally-shaded, unlined style that draws attention to the colors in the scenery and animals. It's a World of Funny Animals, but lot of different animals are depicted over the course of the comic in contexts that don't portray them as characters, and only a handful of particular individuals could even be considered characters in the first place. Blue Moon Blossom takes its minimalist cast even further than most examples of this trope by not even naming any of the characters in or out-of-universe, in addition to the general lack of text, and only minimally characterizing the ones we could count as characters.
- Homestuck:
- After the prologue of the strip is mostly spent with John messing around in his room and going outside, we're treated to a mysteriously atmospheric animation of the empty neighborhood outside.
The streets are empty. Wind skims the voids keeping neighbors apart, as if grazing the hollow of a cut reed, or say, a plundered mailbox. A familiar note is produced. It's the one Desolation plays to keep its instrument in tune.
- Jane's Sburb land is this, the land of Crypts and Helium. It is very atmospheric and the update it is introduced in contains various puzzles. The author himself said that it was an homage to Myst and other such point-and-click games.
- Likewise, a Dead Session starts out in a similar state before getting more complex.
- After the prologue of the strip is mostly spent with John messing around in his room and going outside, we're treated to a mysteriously atmospheric animation
Web Original
- Alice Isn't Dead: Zig-Zagged as the trucker Character Narrator vacillates in describing her surroundings with her shifts in mood. In "Omelet," the Narrator ambivalently meditates on the nature of the night sky, and whether its more apt to describe it as "beautiful," or "nothing." In context, she's musing wistfully and nihilistically in the aftermath of being traumatized by a Humanoid Abomination stalker. Subsequently, she articulates a mild fear of particularly empty vistas like flatlands, until in "Nothing to See," she's actually relieved by the pleasant way Kansas grasslands offer "nothing to see." Then she hears noises from her trailer, and her fear and isolation are underscored yet again.
Western Animation
- Sonic the Hedgehog (SatAM): The Void is a vast, empty dimension. When inside it, a person can see everything on Mobius, and magic can allow a person to do quite literally anything except escape or interact with the outside world. Robotnik used it to exile the wizard Naugus, who used his magic to shape the Void into a beautiful crystalline city designed to resemble Mobitropolis.
- Transformers:
- Beast Wars is kinda like this. There are less than ten Maximals, and less than ten Predacons, in a prehistoric Earth populated by primitive hominids.
- Beast Machines as well. Only now there are, at most, three bad guys at the same time. And they are in Cybertron. And everybody except the good guys is Megatron.
Real Life
- The Universe has an untold billions of stars, but mostly it's a black abyss, staring into our eyes. Then again, the Hubble Ultra Deep Field image has shown that even that "darkness" is full of light from distant galaxies - human eyes just aren't sensitive enough to see it unaided.
- The Moon. When you are on the light side, sunlight reflected from the ground is so bright that eyes and cameras adjusting to the ambient lighting can't see or capture the stars, making the sky perfectly black with only the sun and possibly the Earth visible. On the dark side, there is only starlight in the sky — except the fourteen days in which the Sun is up, and perfect darkness on the ground.
- Sunyata concept in buddhism. Nagarjuna in his treatise on the great virtue of wisdom wrote about 18 kinds of emptiness. Now, honestly, one must really love void stuff to make up something like this, discerning various sorts of nothingness and creating a whole separate flow of philosophy around it. And as there are different branches of buddhism, each buddhist will have his own understanding of void, thus if you ask many of them about sunyata you will accumulate a very elegant and beautiful description of it.