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.
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).
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?”
Jeopardy. The newest one I know of is multiple choice and some of the answers are hard.
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…”
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.
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.
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
Pathologic 2 - Stress Simulator, decide what to do with dwindling resources. Notoriously difficult.
Orwell: Keeping an Eye On You - The information you pass on, is going to really affect the story. A couple of times, I really felt conflicted about the decision.
This War of Mine - Do you rob innocent at the cost of your humanity or fight those bandits who are looting at the cost of your life
I’ll second This War of Mine. It draws from the experiences of civilians during the Siege of Sarajevo in the 90s. The choices are hard, and they have real consequence, and what you pick will haunt your dreams.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 think as someone who enjoys being in the zeitgeist of gaming. The switch is still kind of non debatable. It has way too many varied and strong first parties. While Sony doesn’t have as many. Most of their game release within the GotY range currently so also worth it.
If you are a normal gamer. You are correct in some way. Realistically I may recommend Xbox in favour basically only for gamepass. It’s cheaper than a PC post graphics card gouge and is less scary to newcomers. Their gamepass is also slightly better.
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.
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’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.
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 think if console is your way of gaming then upgrading to a PS4 or XBSX is alright.
Personally I only bought an XSS because it was relatively cheap last year (plus Gamepass with the £1 upgrade offer) but I’m done with future consoles now. PC gaming doesn’t have to expensive so that’s the way forward for myself.
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