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?
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.
AI with a sense of humor?
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.