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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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.
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.
Frostpunk
SO STRESSFUL!
I love this game so much. I have to constantly walk away from the stress lol.
Civ Beyond Earth has the neat approach that it replaces the old “build a spaceship to alpha Centauri” with three different technological endings each with different moral implications. The game is about human transcendence so any ending is going to be about changing humanity.
The problem is that the game itself is not one of the better entries in the Civ series otherwise.
Ah please tell me you’ve played Alpha Centauri.
Yes, many many many years ago. Beyond Earth is the palest of pale imitation.
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.
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.
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!
The word you’re looking for there is ‘isometric.’
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.
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.
Baldur’s Gate 3 has a lot of really hard hitting decisions, and I’m in awe at how they’re able to make the story work with just how many choices there are.
Ehhhh, it has a lot of decisions, yes. But in the end: do any of them matter at all? I feel like 99% of my decisions never made any kind of difference whatsoever at the end.
I did a whole bunch of stuff with Shadowheart and she wasn’t even in my ending at all. Totally missing. I did even more crazy stuff with Karlach, and in the end I was given zero dialog or options or chances to do anything with her, the game forced her to say “I’m getting too hot” and fall down and explode and die. I did by far the most stuff with my primary character Astarion, and in the end I got zero options to do anything with the woman he loved and he ran away to hide in a cave.
So… Yes there are lots of options to make decisions one way or another. But none of them matter at all whatsoever in the end. So, don’t be too in awe, because the way they make the story work is just totally ignoring anything you ever did.
You made choices and got the results of those choices. The alternative results are different.
!There are multiple endings where Karlach survives in different ways. Shadowheart’s story has at least three possible outcomes, maybe more that I haven’t seen. This goes on and on for each origin character. Even NPCs you encounter in Act 3 are shaped by your choices earlier in the game.!<
Frankly, based on your description, it sounds like you made a bunch of lame decisions. That’s neat endings and then the middling one you got.
Did you miss the “no spoilers, please” bit in the OP? That’s a dick move.
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.
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.
Pyre. The long-term goal is to get you and your boys out of fantasy australia, but there are complications along the way. Namely, who gets their freedom, and who doesn’t? Are you really going to let your goofy dog buddy go when he’s your best party member? Will you throw the match and let one of your favorite rivals win their freedom instead? Wouldnt it be really funny to let the little goblin loose back in civilization instead of someone who actually wants to go back home to their families? These are the tough questions Pyre asks of you, and they go places.
I know Pyre is probably Supergiant’s worst game, but it was still damn good and very overlooked. Everyone should check it out, the story was really good. Also Epic gave it away for free once or twice, so check your library.
Banner Saga
Dragon Age, the original first one. Definitely no really happy endings there…
Yes, your grace, is a great short game
I’d recommend Tyranny. Its a CRPG, where you play as an envoy of basically villains that are sweeping through the world, conquering almost everything. Most of the choices are pretty difficult, because from what I remember its usually “bad or different bad”, without it being clear what’s going to be worse. Because you’re an envoy for a dictator with the power to literally wipe an entire continent with a single sentence, you can’t just go " fuck this, I’m gonna ignore the orders and do good", and balancing the long term and short term consequences makes every decision pretty difficult.
For example, if you get an order to “capture this fortress within few days or I’ll wipe the entire island”, any small war-crime now may be the long term good option, if it helps you capture it in time, and helping the soldier asking you to help find his wife nearby may be lost time you can’t be sure you can afford.
fate/ stay night and other visual novels fit this category. steins gate is also a notable one.
somnium files have a lighter version in terms of gravity of decisions.
you can kill people in morrowind and oblivion.
a good bethesda-like game that comes to mind is kingdom come: deliverance
