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?
Life is Strange Telltale walking dead Final Fantasy X (or VII, or basically insert most any) Gone Home Mass Effect 1&2 (never finished 3 lol) Outer Wilda Undertale Descent Freespace 2 Silent Hill 2 Heavy Rain Disco Elysium I have no mouth and I must scream Limbo Braid
Outer Wilds for sure!
Freespace 2 is such an underated game, the desperate scramble to survive as an eldritch horror of a race slowly and surely eradicates everything in its path. Chilling…
I still get chills playing when the collosus jumps in-system first time and in subsequent scenes where your flying a incredibly tiny fighter vs capital ships that take up your entire screen.
I really haven’t felt that sense of awe in other space games oddly, and the story of both 1 and 2 was chilling.
Underrated for sure. But 99 was a amazing year for games (I’m a huge system shock 2 fan). A cursory wiki look at 99 makes me feel so sorry for modern gen kids waiting over a decade for a new elder scrolls or GTA.
- Heroes of Might and Magic III
- System Shock 2
- Final Fantasy VIII
- Age of Empires III
- Grand Theft Auto 2
- Resident Evil 3: Nemesis
- Chrono_Cross
- Unreal Tournament
- Pokémon Gold* and Silver
- Donkey Kong 64
- Super Smash Bros
- Silent Hill
- Syphon Filter
- Driver
- EverQuest
- Homeworld
- Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater
- Planescape: Torment
Come on, noone mentioning Planescape Torment so far?!
What changes the nature of a man?
Goosebumps.
Gone Home - when I finished the game I was legitimately sad that I couldn’t spend more time with the people whose lives I got to know so intimately from their environments. And yes, they didn’t feel like characters anymore, they felt like actual people. That’s one of the highest praises I can give to a game’s storytelling.
Yakuza 0 got me very hard in the feels…
Such a shame that the next ones (1-4) weren’t as good. But Zero… what a ride.
New Vegas, the writing of the dialoges are brilliant. Some of the funniest or straight up saddest stuff are both there.
I just played around 6 hours of it, but Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 intro made me cry. With everything going on in the world right now the sense of despair is very relatable.
This game casually dropped phenomenal quality across the board. Best writing I’ve encountered yet.
Outer Wilds. The game isn’t very text-heavy, but what there is feels important and personal. With the way the story is told, it is quite possibly my favorite story overall. I don’t want to say too much, since knowledge is key in that game, but I would highly recommend it.
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 ❤️
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.
Spiritfarer did this to me, I was very much invested in every character (except the bird and the bull, they can fuck off)
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
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.
Legend of Mana
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
