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?
Just answer our increasingly difficult questions.
Trolley problem: One track is one person, the other is 10
Next level
Okay well now the one person is your mom, and the 10 are 1 year olds you don’t know
Next level
Okay the one person is your best friends mom and the 10 are young kids from your immediate or extended family
Next level
Okay the one person would cure cancer tomorrow, and the 10 are friends or family
…
Or, y’know, go with the original version of the trolley problem, where you start with the classic formulation (do you pull the lever?), then move to a new scenario;
“You’re a doctor, working in a hospital that has been cut off from outside resources by a disaster. You have five patients, one in need of a liver, one a heart, one a pair of kidneys, one a set of lungs, and one a pancreas. You have no suitable organs available, and all five patients will die without transplants, but there is a healthy young janitor working in the hospital who, by a stroke of extreme luck, is a compatible donor for all five patients. You could kill the janitor, harvest their organs, and save five people. Should you do it?”
Fascinatingly, almost everyone opts to pull the lever in the first part, but refuses to kill the janitor in the second, even though they are, from a deeply utilitarian perspective, the same choice. Unravelling why we see them as different is where things get really interesting.
The trolley problem is easy all of these questions are easy
Level 1 - one person Level 2 - the kids Level 3 - best friend’s mom Level 4 - cancer cure guy
None of it matters in the long run anyway, so might as well pick the choices that affect you directly. Toughest one in this is the best friend’s mom definitely.
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.
I know exactly the part you mean and same. Amazing moment. I also LOVED the sequel. Criminal that it didn’t do as well as they wanted because I want them to make an even bigger version next. True Colours was pretty good though
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.
Man to me it’s their best, I loved every single part of it, I connected to the story and it’s relation to gameplay more than any of their other titles
My favorite of all time for exactly this is Spec Ops: The Line. Its a third person shooter and really fun, but its main selling point is making super tough morally gray decisions. Still one of my favorite game stories ever. You can usually get it really cheap and its just perfect for what tou described.
Was also going to mention this! Love that game and have played it twice. I even remember two set pieces in the game like a movie and sometimes recant them to friends as if it were from a movie cuz they probably wouldn’t understand.
Every game on Steam that uses the publisher’s launcher.
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.
Ah yeah I see!
I was just thinking of trying to do it without erasing anyone’s game or making them start over.
What if I have two link cables and no friends?
Nipple tassels.
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In Sekiro you have a choice around two thirds into the game which causes the game to end immediately (with a very bad ending); since the game autosaves all the time, once you make that choice you have to start the entire game over and get to that point again to make a different choice.
Yeah, that’s bad game design IMO unless the game is an hour or two long. The player should be able to roll back when they fuck up that much. In fact, only one save file and no way to roll back if it gets corrupted or you realize how badly you have fucked up is always a bad design.
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The random premature endings were already annoying in nier automata, and that did have save files. I almost never replay things, I get extremely bored. Took me forever to get through the second playthrough of nier automata as well, since that is so similar to the first.
If a game pulled that on me I just wouldn’t play it ever again and watch a cut scene compilation or something.
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Because I am going to know ahead of time if a game does that? And it’s not like I didn’t enjoy nier automata.
Also no ones saying games can’t have anything like that, just that it’s not really what would generally be considered good design.
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Yea, from how you made it sound it seems similar to how it ended up being in nier - make a choice that does seem like it’ll end the game, but really it’s probably not very serious - credit roll, hope you saved recently. It would’ve very much benefited from simply autosaving at the correct time.
Imo it kinda depends on what kind of ending it is, if it’s still conclusive but maybe a bad end, that seems alright. Just if it clearly leaves me unsatisfied I’d be annoyed. I’d still really prefer just having a reload option, but I’d also rather game devs stick to their vision, just like fromsoft ganes really don’t need an explicit easy mode, it makes sense they’d also stick to this if they want to do it. It’ll be great for some people, and others will hate it, and that’s fine.
2077 cyberpunk only plays out badly
The saddest ending is the one where you win.
technically on par for a dystopian game
Wasteland 3 without looking up any guides poses some difficult choices, usually in the form of being forced to side with a certain faction at the expense of another, with no option to skip the choice once it’s presented.
I was looking for this in the list. There are not many win-win scenarios, which is what a post apocalyptic world likely be.
Sometimes Always Monsters
An indie game called OneShot from the Undertale knockoff genre has only one choice that matters, but god damn what a horrible choice, particularly since a child has to make it. And by the way, the game is called OneShot because it’s designed to be played exactly once. If you want to play again, you have to mess with some files to do so.
Yes, your grace, is a great short game
Dishonored franchise. The world goes from bright to nightmarish depending on your choices
I’m going to go a little against the grain and recommend Fuga: Melodies of Steel and its sequel. It’s not exactly what you described, but the game is very adept on forcing extremely difficult and impactful choices on you naturally through its gameplay.
Believe or not, Cyberpunk 2077. There are a few very hard ethical and moral dilemmas.
My playthrough of cyberpunk I found that they had these choices, but the effect was identical regardless of what you chose (except the very end of the base game, and the DLC) I enjoyed the game, but that was my biggest annoyance