For me, it happened when I beat Breath of the Wild. After stalling for weeks—checking off side quests, collecting Korok seeds, and upgrading the majority of my armor—I finally defeated Calamity Ganon. It was over so quickly that I felt a bit empty after. Never mind that I could reload my game and Ganon would be back, that I could keep exploring, that I could start a new file in Master mode: I’d crossed some invisible threshold. Even if I returned to Hyrule, it would be, somehow, different.
Cue a bout of beat-the-game blues.
These feelings are common. Readers call it a “book hangover” when they, as Clare Barnett from Book Riot explained, “can’t stop thinking about the fictional world that has run out of pages.” Academic research in the field of arts and leisure calls it post-series depression, or PSD; a 2019 study defined it as “the feelings of melancholy and longing that can occur when an individual’s all-consuming film or screen product comes to an end.” In the gaming sphere, it’s called post-game depression (which even has its own Urban Dictionary entry, with this example sentence: “I have been avoiding my favorite game recently due to my post-game depression”—my BotW stalling, called out!).
