Beautiful Void

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.

Anime and Manga

 * Haibane Renmei
 * Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou
 * Kurogane Communication
 * Blame
 * Tenshi no Tamago
 * Bakemonogatari and its sequel Nisemonogatari

Film

 * 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.
 * The Canadian film Nothing is entirely this trope, although we do know what happened.
 * Gerry (2002) is just two men lost in the New Mexico desert.
 * The pristine forest surrounding The Village works this way, and is critical to The Reveal.
 * Sergio Leone Spaghetti Westerns.

Literature

 * Craig Harrison's The Quiet Earth.
 * Lois Lowry's 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.
 * Cittàgazze in The Subtle Knife appears completely uninhabited to Lyra and Will when they first arrive there.
 * 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.
 * The Wood Between the Worlds is one in The Magician's Nephew.

Live Action TV

 * Dr. Maki's ultimate goal in Kamen Rider OOO is to create one of these.

Theater

 * Our Town

Video Games

 * The Dig - actually a double example, with both Cocytus and.
 * Ico
 *  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.
 * Played with in Knytt; there are people, but you can't interact with them.
 * Myst, with a quote from Douglas Adams about it as the trope namer
 * The Neverhood
 * Scratches
 * Metroid Prime. Echoes and Corruption less so, because of friendly NPCs.
 * Super Metroid, too - the opening sees you traverse an otherwise empty area, discover something, then Back Track through the same, now populated, area.
 * 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 prerecorded 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 (Combine drained seas to get to minerals) and after exiting Aperture, Chell emerges into a crop field, so perhaps some civilization survived in the USA.
 * Sub Machine. 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.)
 * Aquaria: The only other living being that isn't trying to kill you at one point is aside from that, most of the world is massive, empty, and incredibly beautiful.
 * 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.
 * 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 patrolling Atlantis).
 * Schizm emphasizes the "void" over the "beautiful," even more than The Crystal Key. Civilization on the Ghost Planet you're exploring 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.
 * 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. For game purposes, you're the only person in the galaxy.) 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.
 * 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.
 * Vagrant Story
 * This appears to be one of the core principles behind thatgamecompany's upcoming title Journey.
 * Turgor (in English-speaking countries, The Void, appropriately enough).
 * Flower, definitely the beautiful kind most of the time.
 * The Path, wandering through a melancholy forest accompanied by sad and ambient music really defines this trope, but this Beautiful Void can quickly turn into Nightmare Fuel.
 * Minecraft, at least in single player Survival mode. For all the beautiful scenery and the wonderful monuments and castles you can build it still doesn't change the fact that you're alone, the only sentient being on a world eight times the size of the Earth. Oh, and there's horrible monsters that come out at night.
 * Two of the enemies are the zombies and the skeletons, which are both types of monsters that traditionally used to be people, suggesting that there were once people, but they've all been killed or turned into horrible monsters and there are no other signs of civilized life ever having existed, which is quite jarring when you think about it for too long.
 * Having become used to being the default king of everything, players weren't that happy to learn that NPC villages were due to be introduced, sometimes jumping to the first conclusion of "Kill'Em All".
 * Flywrench. Glitch ambient music plays in the background and everything is dark and mysterious all around, yet somehow peaceful.
 * 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.
 * 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.
 * Fragile Dreams takes place in this.
 * The island in Dear Esther.
 * The Xbox Live Indie game The Deep Cave.

Web Comics

 * Blank It
 * Draw With Me takes place in one of these, though it's implied that there is civilization in the area that we never see.
 * In Homestuck, 's Sburb land is this, the land of . 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.

Web Original

 * The Third and the Seventh by Alex Roman, one of the most beautiful videos to ever grace the internet.

Western Animation

 * 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, until proven otherwise.
 * The moon. "Magnificent Desolation" indeed.