Games that force you to make hard choices

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?

Contramuffin,

Witcher 3

Blackmist,

I think Witcher 1 actually did it better.

The gameplay is a tough sell though.

Contramuffin,

That’s why I’m waiting for the remake!

solitaire,
@solitaire@infosec.pub avatar

The ending choice of the Yennefer romance is underrated. You get to decide the meaning of their long, tumultuous story. Both the heart break and the happily ever after are cathartic, satisfying conclusions.

Though maybe you need to read the books for the full weight of it to land, especially for the heart break option.

solitaire,
@solitaire@infosec.pub avatar

Citizen Sleeper. It’s a short game about precarity and human connection. There are a few off ramps out of the current, desperate situation you’re in that are usually weighed against letting someone go or leaving things behind. It’s unique in games with difficult choices for so rarely about being given compelling reasons to do bad things, just choices that are hard for their emotional consequences.

Blubber28,

A bit of an obscure one is Roadwarden. If I remember correctly, it was made by a single person. The grafics are pixelated style, which is usually a bit of a turn off for me (I don’t need hyperrealistic, just don’t like big pixels), but the gameplay is amazing. It is a combination of a graphical novel and an RPG where choices matter. It does not have spicy real-time combat or a leveling system, but your choices in the story and of your class matter.

To give a quick introduction to the story: You start as a roadwarden, someone tasked with keeping the roads safe. You are tasked by the elite in a rich city to assess the trading prospects with a poor province up north; assess its people, infrastructure, and resources that they offer. You have a limited time to complete your task, as autumn and winter are closing in, and the nights are too dangerous to venture on the roads.

In this game, you cannot help everyone. Helping one group can condemn another, and actions that may be noble in spirit may fail spectacularly. I’ve had a lot of fun playing through this, and it is my recommendation if you don’t really care for real-time combat.

ZC3rr0r,

I haven’t seen Morrowind’s mentioned, but some of its side quests are very grey in their morality, in ways that later Bethesda games aren’t. Definitely recommend if you want to make choices that keep you wondering if you actually did the right thing, and whether it was in character with your character.

But then again, that goes for the whole story. There’s just enough hints and mentions throughout to make you wonder if you actually are the chosen one or just someone stumbling their way through the game, luckily having events line up with a prophecy.

It’s hard to imagine Bethesda ever attempting something so ambiguous again.

echoplex21,

Mass Effect was pretty great with this and really paved the way for games now. i still don’t know another set of trilogies where the game can be affected from the choices you made years before in an earlier game. I think they went so ambitious that it really tied up their hands with a lot of things for ME3.

PraiseTheSoup,

The Banner Saga 1-3 has you leading an army and offers many difficult narrative decisions that don’t necessarily affect the story outcome but absolutely can make or break your next battle or just generally make you feel bad. Battles are turn-bases tactical style.

Ashtear,

I find games that have genuine path branching to be most satisfying for me in the “choices matter” department. Some games that come to mind for this are Tactics Ogre Reborn (or the PSP version), The Witcher 2, Triangle Strategy, and Baldur’s Gate 3.

There are others that have interesting decisions (especially ending/late-game ones) like Deus Ex, The Witcher 3, and Life is Strange, but I’m not sure if those quite have the scope you’re looking for.

gogosempai,
@gogosempai@programming.dev avatar

Detroit: Become Human fits the bill perfectly! It’s a great game with some of the hardest choices you’ll ever make in a game period.

Crashumbc,

2077 cyberpunk only plays out badly

Drewelite,

The saddest ending is the one where you win.

sealhaslupus,

technically on par for a dystopian game

MIDItheKID,

ShadowRun: Dragonfall

Its an isometric tactics style game that plays like the tabletop RPG it is designed around. It’s a lot of reading, so if you’re not into that stay away, but man… I remember when I beat it I was like “Fuck… Did I fuck up? I think I may have made some wrong decisions. I feel awful now”

I also love the setting it takes place in. For some reason fantasy always takes place in the past. Medieval elves, and dwarves, and Orcs etc. ShadowRun is a dystopian/cyberpunk future where all of these races exist. As if the fantasy world didn’t stop existing after the medieval era.

solitaire,
@solitaire@infosec.pub avatar

I really need to replay Dragonfall and Hong Kong. Never finished either just due to unfortunate circumstance outside the game but thought highly of both.

MIDItheKID,

Returns and Hong Kong were good, but Dragonfall rocked my tits right off. Had to have them surgically reattached.

Sirico,

Vampyr Deus EX -not the square ones Wasteland modern sequels

stsquad,

Wasteland 3 has a number of mutually incompatible outcomes that force you to decide how things will end up.

OhFudgeBars,

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.

hark,
@hark@lemmy.world avatar

Triangle Strategy. I hit a number of points where I had to think hard to make my decision and even then I wasn’t sure if it was what I should’ve gone with. Trying to save and reload to pick something else is futile since I’d just run into another tough decision down the line which modifies things further and it’d take too long to play through multiple key points. It’s an amazing strategy game as well.

DwightAllRight,

Witcher 3, Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, Nationstates.net , all are excellent options along this line.

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