Which games held off disaster striking for as long as possible?

The gaming trope I hate the most is how, in most story-driven games, you spend about 5 minutes of a normal day before something goes totally wrong, and now your character is on the path to revenge without the player really caring about what just happened. The character is invested, but the player is not.

Are there any games that, instead, start off with a good few hours of normalcy before turning everything upside down? I'd like to play something where the stakes actually feel like stakes to me when the said twist happens. Release year doesn't matter, go as old as you want. c:

Well Resident Evil 3 seems to start off bad even in the newly dropped remake trailer. Unlike the other two which start with a bit of peace and quite. No serenity in Raccoon City till a big fat bomb is dropped; death count reaching over one hundred thousand_

Is that high enough "stakes"?

Spec Ops The Line I guess. Gameplay is pretty generic but the story goes places.

@Zuon: The Forest.

Now, bear with me here for a second, because the game starts off with a plane crash, which isn't all nice and normal like you request. But after that it's pretty much just run-of-the-mill survival; chop trees, chip away at rocks, build stuff, eat stuff you hunter-gathered....

...but then a couple hours later night falls and, well, the creepy-crawlies come out. So here you have this perfectly normal survival game based on man vs. nature, then all of a sudden it's man vs nature vs freaky cannibals.

And maybe Outer Wilds? It's not a few hours like you mentioned, but you're this space explorer just minding your own business, doing science and stuff, then every 20 minutes all of existence is wiped out

@vagrantsnow: You are definitely right with that pick. I actually haven't touched it since I reached the first "oh crap" moment. I'm kind of afraid to, but I still know I've gotta keep playing eventually.