Pathologic 2 - it’s a really stressful game, but I think it’d be perfect for the criteria. The choices matter aspect are intertwined in both how you spend your time (it’s limited and you can’t be everywhere at once), and in quests (the more traditional choices, like pick A or B or C). Don’t want to spoil any more but it’s amazing, you don’t need to play the original.
Besides it, I’ve also heard good things from Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, though I haven’t played it personally.
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.
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.
Gave up on gaming in general. Moved to Linux back in October. Had issues getting my games to play because of various issues between Nvidia 535/545 and Wayland, Xorg, or the steam/proton/lutris/aagl/hgl things I tried. Then work got too busy and I’ve put gaming on the back burner 'til I have more time to troubleshoot it (hopefully with new Nvidia/Wayland packages).
You might give it a try – it may just work for you. Not everybody has the same issues, and I’m sure I’ll be able to figure it out later when I have time to troubleshoot it. This is just a busy time of year for me, so as long as my work stuff works, I’m good, and gaming has to sit on the backburner for a bit.
I switched to Linux as my daily driver back last summer and have been able to play every game I’ve tried with literally no issues. Admittedly, I had issues at first but then I switched to Pop!_OS, which has built-in support for Nvidia hybrid graphics. That solved the few gaming issues I had.
With how easy it was and how many games work with no issues, I’m genuinely surprised to hear people say they are having issues with it. I’m not even close to a linux expert. I’m not a programmer. I don’t want my OS to be a hobby, I want it to just work. And so far it has.
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.
I ragequit half way through the final boss after having died for the thirtieth time. The game is absolutely beautiful, but fuck me some of it is tough.
Ended up watching the last bit on YouTube. No regrets.
I doubt that I’ll ever get that far. I used to play games on “hard” difficulty and explore/find everything. Today I’m just glad if I find the time to play, have fun and enjoy the games, even if I need to play on “easy” difficulty. All the completionist aspirations are gone.
I thought Thromebreaker: The Witcher Tales had some extremely tough ones. They also heavily effect your gameplay in that many times they add or remove a character from your party. I had built a deck in that game that relied heavily on a character. That character then did something morally reprehensible and I decided to banish them. That removed them from my deck, too, so I had to come up with a new strategy after that.
Fun game if you can get into it. Almost every choice is extremely morally gray and often feels like there is no good choice at all.
Jedi Fallen Order. I’ve tried a couple times because I really WANT to like the game. But I just can’t stand the fucking souls style of everything comes back when you save. And the boss fights are just too punishing (for me). It’s so frustrating to get stuck on a boss or lost in a zone and come to the realization that I WAS having fun and then the game got in the way of that.
Elden Ring. I had a lot of fun with the game restarting and playing through the first zone on like 6 different characters to try different styles and see what I like. But at some point in the second zone I realized I was just stressed out all the time. It wasn’t fun, it was stressful. I can appreciate the game and I don’t regret spending the money on it, but I realized it just wasn’t for me.
I think I’m done with souls games. They’re just not for me. I really wanted to play Jedi Survivor but I suspect the new cool stuff will just make me more frustrated with the souls aspects, Oh well.
I really wanted to like JFO but I just hated the combat mechanics, it almost seemed like it was lightsaber fighting underwater with how sluggish it seemed, and I hated the number of times I died early on from basic beasts just because you can’t break a 3-button combo so if they dodge ever so slightly that’s a good 2-3 seconds they have to lunge attack.
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.
It is all to easy to miss the immense benefits of accommodating accessibility for those of us who don’t need them though.
Most people would generally agree that NASA working on the hard problems of going into space has benefited a wide variety of industries and sciences that aren’t directly related to space travel. Most people would generally agree that athletes competing at the absolute top of a competitive sport benefits everyone who plays the sport both from developing better form and techniques and from the technology and science related to the sport becoming more competitive over time. Those benefits often extend far beyond the sport. A sports doctor being focused on getting you rehabilitated from an injury so that you can specifically play sports again might be a much more effective doctor at returning your body to health than a normal doctor who just wants to get you relatively mobile again so you can get make it into work. That sports doctor is likely using science and methodology that was developed at least partially to help professional athletes rehabilitate their injuries.
I hope we get to a point soon where most people would generally agree that accommodating accessibility needs for people with relatively “uncommon” disabilities benefits a similarly wide range of people and things. If a restaurant has to make their door wheelchair accessible, when someone has a medical emergency inside the restaurant and EMTs are trying to wheel the patient out the door as quick as possible to save their life, the effort that went into making it so someone can get into the restaurant who is in a wheelchair all of a sudden spontaneously improves the life of the victim by helping them get to the hospital faster.
This isn’t a narrative that will just happen about accessibility (especially in video games), we have to keep pointing it out to give it life.
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.
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.
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