I just finished playing Triangle strategy and sometimes that games writing gets so good but feel what the very characters are feeling. What about you? What have been those games that have gripped your hand and made you feel every turn of the page?
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I’ll say the obligatory Red Dead Redemption. What a ride. From beginning to end. It legitimately feels like an “epic” where the character and world develop.
As you get to the end of the game and you’re in the more populated areas that feel like they have left the wild West behind and the parallel with the story… it’s great.
The quarry, and until dawn were pretty good. A bit lacking in gameplay, but awesome stories.
Witcher 3 tells many stories that contribute to an overarching story.
Fallout new Vegas does it with the option of murder hoboing
Bg3 is pretty good story wise too ❤️
Spiritfarer did this to me, I was very much invested in every character (except the bird and the bull, they can fuck off)
A Way Out. Highly recommend playing it with your closest friend. Fucking game made me feel stronger emotions than any other game I’ve ever played, because the motherfucker I was playing with is my best friend. I’m not going to spoil the ending, I’m just going to say: heavy fucking feelings
Don’t forget to try their other games if you haven’t already! It Takes Two is wonderful, and the recently released Split Fiction is my favorite of them all.
Life is Strange
Spiritfarer
Titanfall 2
Hellblade
Red Dead 2
Hades
OxenfreeMany more, but these stood out on actually caring about the characters and what happened to them.
Life is Strange 1 was good, a bit silly at points but I enjoyed the cringe.
The other games were kinda bad.
Bloom and Rage is HILARIOUSLY bad. In every way. It’s amazing.
Oh I forgot about Oxenfree. Yeah, the story and voice acting were quite good, but the game had so many annoying design/UI decisions that it left me frustrated more than anything else :c
Disco Elysium is, without a doubt, the best written game I’ve ever played. That game had me experience the entire rainbow of emotions.
With the praise this game regularly gets, I was unpleasantly surprised to find that the story was inelegantly delivered by info dump.
An info dump implies its giving too much info at once. Disco Elysium paces its story well, it just doesn’t conform to how you would normally tell a story within a game.
It frequently gave too much info all at once about how its world works, yes.
It’s very text heavy, which isn’t for everyone.
It’s definitely for me. I ate it UP, and was still hungry for more.
I would say that the story of DE kind of plays a back seat to the inner dialogue stuff imo… It’s not the kind of game that you just rush through so you can see what the plot is.
I wasn’t rushing and info dumps weren’t my only criticism. There were some things that I could chalk up to just personal preference like my distaste for almost every character I encountered in the first 5 hours, but when it did decide to start filling me in on how its world works, I found that to be well below the standards of the praise the game gets for its writing. That’s not to say that it’s easy to do it better, but I can point to a number of other works of fiction that show how it can be done. The inner dialogue could have been a great vehicle to do it more elegantly.
At first I was like “haha look at the funny hobo cop, no pants”.
By hour 70 I decided to finally read Chomsky, 11/10 can recommend.
I honestly think it’s objectively the best written game ever.
Seconding Spiritfarer.
I also became entirely entranced by Horizon: Forbidden West. A death in that game hit me unexpectedly hard, and I had to take a couple days off from playing it to kind of deal with the grief. I tried the first Horizon, but I feel it didn’t get anywhere close to the depth in worldbuilding and character development of the second game
Legend of Mana
This may seem like a cheeky answer, but Limbo.
Sometimes it’s not about what you say, it’s about what you don’t.
Rime is a fun but emotional one.
Citizen Sleeper isn’t my usual type of game but I was hooked instantly by it all.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance 1 and 2 have an awesome main story line with writing that makes me feel like I am playing video game sequels to A Knight’s Tale.
But then it also has some pretty yawn inducing stuff, too, that might be interesting to history buffs since it takes place in real life, during real historical events in Bohemia. A lot of politics and nobility dick-waving. I skipped through a lot of random side quest dialogue because it was just an hour of discussing politics. 🤣
Disco Elysium tho is hands down the best written game I’ve ever played. We need more video games to be written by actual authors. It also just has an insane amount of branching paths and differences in how you play that mostly appear in dialogue, but also just wearing different clothing can change things dramatically.
Final Fantasy XV… Usually I get wet eyes when the games do it right. But with FF15 I literally cried.
A Mind Forever Voyaging, by Infocom.
It’s an old text adventure from the 80’s with a particularly cool and oddly relevant concept: You take the role of an AI that’s been meticulously raised in a simulation to truly become a general intelligence. The reason this project was undertaken was to eventually send you, the AI, into other simulations based in the near future to test the outcomes of various political policies of the new republican government, record your interactions, and report back to the engineers who created you.
The game’s designer said that he created the game in response to the despair he felt from Ronald Reagan being elected.
I haven’t gotten super far in it, but it has an incredibly well written short story in the manual that details all the events leading up to the start of the game, and so far the game itself is unlike anything else I’ve ever played.
Talos Principle is the best story I’ve played hands down.
FFVII set me up to be an eco-Marxist.
Disco Elysium helped me come to terms with my alcoholism and learn to move forward with my life instead of wallowing in self pity and loathing for the things I had done.
Really those are the two games that affected me most heavily in my life.
