Hey all!
I’d like to request recommendations (spoiler free!) for games where you need to make choices, take sides, kill or not kill someone, follow or do not follow orders, but where the consequences actually matter - and most importantly, where the choices aren’t “obviously good choice vs obviously bad choice”.
Give me games where I can choose to side with one kingdom or another, but there’s no clear moral high ground, or where I need to decide to save someone dear to me at the cost of innocent lives. I do not want things like “save all the children and get the happy ending and make flowers grow” versus “kill everybody and everything blows up and the world gets all its water replaced by acid”.
What games fit this requirement?
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Disco Elysium is a fantastic one. There are an insane amount of choices that shape how you go about the investigation of the hanged man and ultimately what happens beyond that investigation. Choices of who to side with, how to side (openly or playing multiple sides, etc.), choices that ultimately define what kind of detective you are (by-the-book boring, superstar douchebag, violent tough guy, Sherlock Holmes-esque genius, etc., including my favorite: Twin Peaks Lynchian detective that bases their decisions off of dreams, intuition and imaginary conversations with the dead body), and even how failing or succeeding at something can lead to progress in very different ways. If you fail to hit that person you tried to punch, or miss that shot with your gun, or utterly fail to convince someone to help you, you progress through in very different ways so that failing your way to the truth is just as satisfying and entertaining as succeeding your checks to get there.
And of course Fallout: New Vegas. Whether you choose to support the New California Republic, Caesar’s Legion, Mr. House, or a truly independent New Vegas, none of them are perfect. Each succeeds in an ideal society in some ways but completely fails at others, leaving you to decide which imperfect system you feel is the right one for the world instead of shoving an obvious answer in your face.
Or maybe I am some kind of supercop… 🤔
Disco: Elysium really is an absolutely fantastic game. Hard to describe how much it moved the goal post for these games.
The 3 series is the best at this.
The first game in the series is Mass Effect 3, which is followed by Witcher 3 and the sequel to that is Baldur’s Gate 3.
Can’t wait for the next one, I hear it’s gonna be called Half-Life 3.
Wait, what did you just say? So Half Life 3 is confirmed! Yay!
If you like randomly made stories, you can try Rimworld.
You will quickly find yourself asking very difficult questions. Is taking on the cripple something you can afford to do? Is using medicine on a less valuable colonist smart? Do you let some of your colonists starve, or start a war with friendly neighbors? Cannibalism will make your neighbors hate you and some of your colonists might rebel over it, but that’s better than some of them starving… right?
I should play Rimworld one of these days. Always heard good things but just never got around it.
If you’re into colony Sims Rimworld is amazing! Biotech and Idology are also great DLC expansions that give you a lot more options. IMO Royalty is the weakest one so if you’re just starting out I might recommend passing on it unless you really love the game
Disco elysium. Made me want to start it all over again several times.
And there’s a lot of things that are just up to chance too. My friend somehow managed to die to the ceiling fan in 2 separate runs.
This War of Mine. Honestly can’t believe nobody else has mentioned it.
You play as a group of civilians in a war torn country. By day you craft things needed for survival like a stove for cooking, guns for protection, barricades to prevent raiders. At night you send one person with a backpack to scavenge an area of your choice for things like food, medicine, supplies etc. The others will either sleep or guard the property. Things you do while scavenging have real effects on your characters. Decided to rob an elderly couple? Your characters will react based on their personality.
Things become grim fast if you decide to start robbing supplies or get attacked. Your players get sick, become depressed, starve, get hurt etc. I’ve never made it to the end.
It’s a great way to understand the struggles of being a civilian in a war. The Polish government actually recommends it for educational purposes and the devs have donated a lot of proceeds to charities serving people impacted by war, including Ukraine most recently.
It’s very good, but the tone can be totally broken if you master combat. Killing soldiers doesn’t lower morale, so they are free targets.
Depending on what locations spawn, it is possible to completely ruin the intended vibe. I’ve wiped out the military outpost and ended up with so many supplies I didn’t know what to do with them all.
TWOM is so good. What you say about things going bad fast is very true and the repercussions of something minor are real.
I was a bit aggressive on like my second playthrough and ended up killing a couple people to get their medicine. The guy that killed them was too depressed to scavenge and killed himself. Then another person got depressed because of that and wouldn’t do anything. Then she got sick and died shortly after. I was too sad to play for awhile after that one.
I’m wildly surprised that no one has suggested “Papers, Please” yet.
Papers please is so much fun.
For sure! Fun but also very heavy in its themes.
The obvious answer is Pathologic. You play as one of three possible characters in a black plague-infested town in the russian steppe, trying to help people and survive.
As days go by, the situation worsens and, in order to survive, you are forced to make very hard decisions. Can you spare the food for the others? Will you rob someone of their medicines? Will you risk going to the most dangerous parts of the city, where the stench of infection permeates the air?
I’ll quote The Nocturnal Rambler’s review of the game, which is one of my favourite video game reviewers:
Making it to the end of a day is a genuine accomplishment in this game, considering all the work you have to do to stay alive, and that the game really doesn’t care if you live or die. It won’t hold your hand to make sure you get through to the end; it’s entirely possible to make it through 10 days and then back yourself into a corner where you have absolutely no hope of survival, short of loading a save from a few (in-game) days ago. Or perhaps to save yourself the agony of replaying several hours of the game, you end up in terrifying, desperate scenarios where you have to sell your only weapon for a few scraps of bread, or murder a child for the medicine he’s carrying while you’re about to die from infection. That’s true horror right there.
It’s not an easy game and it’s not a good game, even. It’s old and dated and janky, but it’s also full of charm and personality. I wouldn’t say it’s a game meant to be played, as much as it is an experience worth going through. You won’t have fun playing the game. Even if you can overlook its pain points, it’s an objectively oppressive game that will make you feel miserable from beginning to end, and increasingly so. I wouldn’t say it’s for everyone, and I don’t mean that in an elitist way. Some people simply won’t stand this much bleakness during the time they are supposedly spending to find entertainment.
Interesting are all the points you share. I’ve never been so convinced to try a game even after being explicitly told it’ll not be fun. Give me that sweet pain.
Hope you enjoy it then. Please update us when you get around to it!
From what I heard, Pathologic 2 is basically a 2019 remake of the original, so it should be prettier, less janky but still basically the same game, right?
I have heard very good things about it, but I can’t talk for myself, as I haven’t played it. My only recommendation is to stay away from the console versions of the game, as I tried it on Xbox One and it was unplayable (heard the same about the PS4 port, too). Maybe it’s better on next gen, but I wouldn’t risk it.
Two things worth mentioning:
- The remake only has one character, the Haruspex. If you want to play as the Bachelor or the Changeling, you’ll need to grab the original game.
- There are difficulty settings in the remake. I would leave them as default, as I think the difficulty of the game, and the conflicting decisions you’ll need to undertake because of it, is an integral part of the experience. That being said, if you really like the game and want to see it through, you can tweak the difficulty a bit, and accessibility is always a plus in my book.
- Again, this is just hearsay as I haven’t played it, but from what I’ve gathered, Pathologic 2 is more a retelling than a faithful remake. Same setting and same ending, but a different road, so to speak. You could play either one and then move on to the other if you like it.
I’m a big fan of Tyranny by Obsidian Entertainment. Classic CRPG, isomorphic for the majority of it. The game starts with you making decisions that set the initial state of the world as you lead the army that finishes your evil overlord’s conquest of the world. Then the game truly starts and goes on to be one of my favourite CRPGs of all time.
The word you’re looking for there is ‘isometric.’
Popped in to mention Tyranny, saw it was the first comment.
Absolutely LOVE Tyranny, its got so many morally questionable choices to make! I really, really hope Obsidian makes a sequel!
One of the few games where I gravitated towards the lawful evil route because it just felt so natural. It’s such a shame we will probably never see a sequel.
Pokémon. You get to choose from Charmander, Bulbasaur, and Squirtle for your starter. And everyone you know will judge you for which starter you picked.
When you have a link cable and a friend you just exchange starters to each other so you have all three of them.
What if I have two link cables and no friends?
Nipple tassels.
Doesn’t the original only have a single save slot?
So you’d need at least a third copy for both of you to get all three.
Two copies are enough.
You just safe 5 starters on one copy and then move the two that are double back to the other copy when they got their third starter.
Ah yeah I see!
I was just thinking of trying to do it without erasing anyone’s game or making them start over.
Spec Ops: The Line is a pretty decent pick when it comes to having “morally ambiguous choices”. the game itself states that there are no “real good choices” and thus, you must pick between the two evils.
That was what I was going to recommend as well!
I scrolled too much to see this one.
The right choice is to just stop, but this is a phenomenal game that should be experienced by more people. Just don’t let kids play it, it’s very much an adult game.
I saved your post to try out the game. Sadly, it appears that it’s being erased from the Internet.
“Spec Ops: The Line … has been delisted from Steam, with other online stores to follow.”
that’s very unfortunate, curse you, licensing shenanigans!
Frostpunk
+1 for Frostpunk. Great city builder where the choices you make are often between the lesser of two evils. Very difficult, expect to lose your first few runs!
SO STRESSFUL!
I love this game so much. I have to constantly walk away from the stress lol.
Life is strange is very close to what you’re asking, in the game you can rewind time to a limited degree to try different thing, but sometimes your actions only have consequences much further into the game. Even the things that you can rewind and try different things there’s rarely a clear better choice, since all of them are morally ambiguous, do you take a picture of the security guard harassing a student or do you intervene? One is obviously better, but the other gives you proof which you might need later on.
Amazed I had to scroll this far to see LiS mentioned.
There’s a decision in the first game that legitimately made me get up from the computer and walk away. Absolutely fucking brutal game.
The X-COM series is pretty much these choices all the time, though less in a moral sense and more a strategic risk and reward sense. What do you use your limited time and resources on, how much do you risk when the stakes are high, etc. It’s a little different than the sorts of decisions you’re thinking of, but quite interesting.
I would second Xcom and add: unlike other strategy games, where each character is a nameless unit, Xcom names your units. Not a big deal, but it is a big enough change where you start to create your own stories, even in your head, for the characters. Playing the game in a not easy game mode, causes you to lose soldier from time to time. This really heightens tension when certain characters die, whom you remember, and when some miraculously live. Its a very small, yet somehow meaningful addition to what would otherwise be an endless sea of soldiers.
Are names unusual? The only other tactical game like that that I’ve played is Final Fantasy Tactics and they all have names.
But I agree. In XCom you just accept that you’ll have losses. But they still hurt. My first run-in with Chryssalids was especially brutal. I escaped with two of my men and a failed mission. The rest were one-shotted or eaten by their own.
You bring up a good point, what I was lacking in my post was the combination of names, permanent death, and the very real threat of death. Not certain if Tactics works in a similar way.
It does work the same. The biggest difference is that there’s one or two player characters at any time that will give you a game over if they perma-die. But most of your crew are blank slates (with a name) that you build up, give a specific role, and can perma-die. The roles are more distinct, and there are more roles, so losing them feels like losing a party of your team. Like, your summoner might die, and that was the only summoner you had. You have to put in some effort to replace them.
Now, there is a difference of feel. Random mobs feel like they are for grinding rather than an actual threat. So deaths outside of the story feel like you should just reload your last save to save you the trouble. XCom generally felt like a person died, but it was easier to replace their role with the next man up.
And on a similar note, Massive Chalice is a Kingdom under attack from an otherworldly source. Do you choose to defend point A and let point B and C receive corruption points? Do you take your party of developed, well leveled but older than dirt characters into the fight to guarantee success, ensuring they die of old age while your young upstarts grow old and feeble from lack of combat experience?
Mass Effect 3.
Choosing between the 3 primary colors was the toughest choice of my life.
God damnit.
I’d completely forgotten about that shit. What a let down after a years long multi game play through.
Every choice made in every game led to none of it mattering.
Cyberpunk, and specifically the Phantom Liberty DLC.
I know 2077 has a bad rep for its terrible release, but the game excels in storytelling and mocap above all else. The DLC is accessible at the end of the prologue and requires that you make several hard choices which have a major impact on the dlc’s conclusion.
The DLC is also chok full of side quests and contracts that don’t affect the overall story but can affect your relationship with various factions, and that are affected by other choices made outside the DLC. The quests also feature various difficult choices. Do you kill the guy you were hired to kill, or do you give them a second chance so they can get treated for the cyberpsychosis that made them lash out in the first place?
I can’t recommend this game enough, honestly.
Edit: If you want more details, or have questions, just ask. I don’t want to spoil too much.
Oh man that choice was hard, I legit paused.
I paused a lot on quests like these.
If you don’t have the tech skills, you don’t know what the right way to fix the guy who thinks he’s someone else. Who knows what happens if you choose wrong. What do you do with the guy who stole that eye implant?
Also… Minor spoilers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BuWPaWluAUQ
