Finished *The Last of Us* and feeling even emptier? RPG players are the most likely to get deeply absorbed.

The moment I turned off the game in the early hours of the morning, the room suddenly became a little too quiet. The footsteps were gone from my headphones, the screen went dark, yet my mind was still trapped in that world, circling around it—like after a horror movie ends, when you know the hallway is empty, but a chill still runs down your spine.

This isn’t melodrama. Recently, researchers from SWPS University in Poland and the Stefan Batory Academy of Applied Sciences published a study in Current Psychology that, for the first time, seriously defined what players often call “post-game depression” and even created a quantitative tool for it, called the “Post-Game Depression Scale” (P-GDS).

The study puts it very plainly: as games become more realistic and more immersive, some players, after finishing works with high emotional investment, experience a kind of emptiness and sadness close to “losing something important.” When you come back to yourself, it’s not that you don’t want to play anything else—it’s that everything else suddenly feels off.

What’s more unsettling is that this study didn’t draw conclusions based on vague impressions. Through two surveys involving a total of 373 players, the researchers identified four core dimensions: repeatedly thinking about the game’s content, the psychological challenge brought on by the ending, a strong urge to start over and play it again, and difficulty obtaining the same level of pleasure from other media afterward.

But what truly startled me wasn’t that—it was the conclusion about high-risk groups. The study specifically emphasizes that players of role-playing games (RPGs) are the group at the highest risk of “post-game depression.” The reason isn’t hard to understand: you’re not just watching a story unfold—you’re making decisions, bearing consequences, and little by little stitching yourself into that virtual world. And when the ending finally drops, that sense of detachment feels like waking from a nightmare and realizing that the scariest part isn’t that the monsters are gone, but that the people and the world that accompanied you through the whole journey have vanished too.

That’s also why works like The Last of Us, with their strong narrative focus and strong sense of companionship, often leave players lingering on them long after finishing, even if, strictly speaking, they may not be traditional RPGs. People in the community have long talked about “not being able to get motivated for days after finishing it.” Before, that sounded more like anecdotal experience; now, it finally has a psychological outline.

Of course, the study is also measured in its conclusions. It points out that this emotional state is associated with a person’s tendency toward rumination and with depressive symptoms, but the causal relationship still cannot be definitively established. In other words, games are not simply the “culprit”; they are more like a mirror, making the emotions and psychological patterns you have already invested easier to see.

For players, my advice is very practical: if you’ve just finished a work with extremely intense emotional weight, don’t rush to immediately find the next “even stronger” one to fill the gap. That approach is a bit like a cheap jump scare—the thrill comes fast, and the emptiness comes even faster. Try giving yourself a longer buffer period: read some analyses, listen to the soundtrack, or simply take a couple of days off and let yourself slowly step out of the story.

And for developers, the question raised by psychologist Dr. Kamil Janowicz is well worth considering: now that virtual worlds have become an important source of emotional experience for players, should ending design also take psychological endurance into account? The highest form of horror has never been about kicking you off the edge in one blow, but about making you willingly stand at the brink of the abyss, unable to leave for the longest time.