Games by Artix Entertainment tend to follow a sort of pattern in their stories: Introduce the player to a wacky fantasy/sci-fi world that invokes Better than a Bare Bulb and Rule of Funny constantly, then slowly have it torn apart by ashockingly dark villain and ditch most of the humor during the serious bits. Then, once that arc is over, go back to a comedy focus, and the cycle begins anew. DragonFable skips the "slow" bit and rarely comes out of the dips in the Cerebus Rollercoaster, save for holiday events. After the first arc with Sepulchure wraps up, which already had Nightmare Fuel out the ass with many important and well-loved characters suffering horribly or dying, it goes straight into an arc dealing with the destruction of an entire planet and an Omnicidal Maniac as the villain. The third arc, although dealing with planetary stakes instead of universal ones, has much darker themes, even deconstructing The Hero that you play as in all the AE games. There are a lot of quests and events with a lighter or comedic focus, but virtually all of them exist outside the main story.
id Software did this. Their earlier publication, Commander Keen, was a lighter hearted game that was quite intended for children and maybe relatively more innocent hearted adults. id Software is famous for popularising the first-person shooter in the form of the darkly comedicWolfenstein 3-D and the first two Doom gamesnote Strangely enough, the characters of all these games appear to be related, as discussed here. Then arrived Quake which drops id's tongue-in-cheek humor in favor of an oppressive atmosphere in its visuals, its soundtrack, and its lovecraftian monsters. Doom³ takes it to the extreme, with monochromatic textures, realistic gore, and many areas in total darkness.
There was a short-lived development studio in the 2000's known as Punchline who created PlayStation 2 software. Their first effort was Chulip in 2002, a wacky Animal Crossing-like bit of Japanese fare involving Love at First Sight and running around kissing everyone that you could manage. Four years later, they put out the much, much darker Rule of Rose, a Survival Horror game that embraces western imagery and tropes and thrives on children indangerous situations.
