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. 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.
It’s really easy to do, I died constantly at the beginning
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.
Baldur’s Gate 3! The amount of ways the game can play out is extremely impressive. There are a lot of tough choices to make that can greatly affect your party and even the world as a whole
I’d disagree tbh, so far most of the decisions seem pretty clear cut
e.g save village vs side with hoblinss goblins to kill everyone (vague enough to not be spoiler hopefully)
Some are harder as you go, but yeah nothing is too hard until the end of some storylines in act 3, which is of course what you would expect.
I’ll be honest, I really didn’t come across any. The “challenging moral decisions” werenot hard choices, no matter how many of my party members took them out of context and got pissy.
Unpopular opinion, but for a game with such immaculate writing for two Acts, Act 3 is such a fucking shit show of mediocre writing and forgotten story threads.
Not that controversial, I also didn’t think act 3 was up to the par of 1 and 2.
I felt like the last 3 big decisions you make were pretty hard. I’m not sure how to do spoiler tags otherwise I’d be more specific
I also disagree. Even discounting the large number of choices which were just a binary where one side was cartoonishly evil, I didn’t remember any I found impactful.
I ended up following The Emperor path in Act 3 . There wasn’t a moment where I got to weigh up the pros and cons of each major path, as I had decided I didn’t trust Raphael already and he doesn’t give you enough detail to do so if you don’t play along when you meet him at the start of Act 3. If I had then maybe the Orpheus stuff could have given me pause, but that’s not how it played out.
I think part of this was playing as Tav though, as the decisions with real emotional weight are all centered on origin characters and I didn’t dictate what my companions should do for things that were so personal. Shadowheart’s choice in Act III strikes me as one that probably would have hit.
But the bigger issue is I think Larian just isn’t very good at writing evil. You never get those moments of practical evil. I don’t remember ever having to consider doing something horrible for the greater good or being desperate enough to do something compromising out of self preservation. It was all evil for evil’s sake.
which is of course what you would expect
Nah. I would expect there to be difficult choices before the final act, especially in a game so long.
I’m wildly surprised that no one has suggested “Papers, Please” yet.
Mani bet this plays fine on Steam Deck. I am going to fire this up today.
Fallout New Vegas. You get it up and running with the GOG and some decent mods you’ll have a great time.
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.
I was going to mention this game, +1.
Trying to desperately survive in a world that’s upside down, fighting the hopelessness and trying to survive just one more day and slowly realising the you’re just one day closer to death…
Man, it’s a really great game, but I can’t play it again anytime soon.
Every game on Steam that uses the publisher’s launcher.
The Walking Dead by Telltale.
All 4 of them, really. Those games are made of hard decisions. Also QTEs, but mostly hard decisions.
It’s very disappointing that Telltale went down. The Wolf Among Us by Telltale is also great, and, over a decade later, it’s finally getting a sequel some time this year.
Life is Strange (any of them, favorites are the 1st and True Colors. Both could be played without the other (separate stories)).
Mass Effect (I started with 2nd) is among the best imo.
Detroit Become Human
Heavy Rain - this one had my first immersed quick decision that I was like, “holy shit I just did that” and it made me question if I would’ve acted that way in real life given the scenario.
I’d also add Beyond: Two Souls to the list
Life is Strange hit me so hard. A content warning for people unfamiliar, but a core theme of the game is suicide. It comes at the topic a few times with different contexts that had me crying more than once. Highly recommended.
I love me some Mass Effect, but it’s less “choices matter” and more “illusion of choice”.
I made some shit ass choices on my first playthrough of ME2, during the final mission. Precious Tali took a bullet to the face because of it. I forced myself to live with it and made more sensible choices the next time around. I don’t believe I lost anyone the next time, but when it came to the Kaiden (accidentally called him Carth there for a moment) vs. Ashley, I definitely let Ashley go boom on that second playthrough and every consecutive time afterward as well. Kaiden is moody and a little annoying to have around, but at least he’s not a fucking dickhead like Ashley.
A good chunk of comments have spoilers, so if you read this first beware. I guess people like to brag about game knowledge more than they like having other people experiencing stuff.
Annnnnd now I close this post.
Detroit: Become Human generally has big overarching choices that are more obviously good vs bad, or rather pacifist vs violent and deviant vs machine, but a lot of the smaller in-between choices can make a big difference regarding who lives and who dies, and a lot of them aren’t obvious, especially in Kara’s story line. One in particular that I remember can seem like an obvious “doing the right thing” choice but it actually is a choice that can get several characters killed as a result if you do what seems like the “good person” thing. Getting to the end with everyone still alive can be surprisingly difficult without a guide, and there are a lot of different endings and branching paths depending on a lot of different choices. One character has I think somewhere around 26 separate chances of dying in the story at different points in the game. There’s an achievement for getting all of them lol.
Heavy rain is similar to DBH but less obvious about having particular good or bad routes iirc. Like it doesn’t do the “pacifist vs violent” or “deviant vs machine” style choices, but there are a lot of different choices that can affect the ending and who survives to the end.
Dragon Age Origins is an oldie but a goody with a ton of endings and decisions that aren’t strictly good or bad. The following DA games are good too but the first one fits what you’re looking for the most.
Those are ones I can think of off the top of my head.
If you’re looking for more like this, check out the Telltale games. In particular, I’m a fan of The Wolf Among Us. It’s based on a comic book series (called Fables, if you wanted to google it,) where fairy tale creatures are real and live hidden among humans; It’s a good old fashioned murder mystery where the lead detective is the Big Bad Wolf. I won’t spoil anything here, but there are a lot of decisions which can have a major impact further down the line.
The Batman telltale game is very similar; It’s less focused on “Batman the asskicker” and more focused on “Batman the world’s greatest detective” where you’re trying to uncover a plot by an unknown villain.
The Walking Dead is what put the game studio on the map for most people, but it’s ironically the game I like the least. Your choices do matter, so you may end up enjoying it. But I personally enjoyed the mysteries from the two latter games more than I enjoyed the interpersonal relationships in The Walking Dead. But maybe that’s just my autism talking.
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Detroit: Become Human has some pretty tough decision trees. Not just in how you have to find the options, but even when you only have a few, it’s difficult to choose one because none of them are wrong (or right, for that matter).
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Papers, Please seems incredibly easy, but then you’re given a choice like “this person doesn’t have a permit but their husband did and they say they will be killed if they have to go back; do you do your job or do you take pity on them?”
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Jeopardy. The newest one I know of is multiple choice and some of the answers are hard.
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MGS5? It’s not a choice, but damn do I have to take pause every time I get to the part where you have to put down your entire army while they stand saluting you because they’re infected by vocal chord zombie parasites. You never even talked to these people to get to know them and it’s still like “fuck man these are my friends…”
I didn’t sleep the night after I played that part in MGS5. “We live and die by your orders, Boss” while morosely humming the Peace Walker theme – it’s like Kojima was trying to make the player share Snake’s PTSD.
Including Jeopardy in a list of games like this is the kind of awkward “technically correct” dissonance I’ve come to expect from AI. What a weird inclusion.
AI with a sense of humor?
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If you use Steam you can search on the category “Choices Matter” FYI
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.
Deus Ex? The original one
