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?
A bit of an obscure one is Roadwarden. If I remember correctly, it was made by a single person. The grafics are pixelated style, which is usually a bit of a turn off for me (I don’t need hyperrealistic, just don’t like big pixels), but the gameplay is amazing. It is a combination of a graphical novel and an RPG where choices matter. It does not have spicy real-time combat or a leveling system, but your choices in the story and of your class matter.
To give a quick introduction to the story: You start as a roadwarden, someone tasked with keeping the roads safe. You are tasked by the elite in a rich city to assess the trading prospects with a poor province up north; assess its people, infrastructure, and resources that they offer. You have a limited time to complete your task, as autumn and winter are closing in, and the nights are too dangerous to venture on the roads.
In this game, you cannot help everyone. Helping one group can condemn another, and actions that may be noble in spirit may fail spectacularly. I’ve had a lot of fun playing through this, and it is my recommendation if you don’t really care for real-time combat.