What have been the games whose writing really got into you?
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?
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
I didn't like SpiritFarer. For how much time it takes, there wasn't enough game there. There was a lot of waiting, and it gets worse as the stories progress. They stretched a decent story out 4x longer than necessary.
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.
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.
Horizon: Zero Dawn. Such a haunting, beautiful story.
Really gave me the feeling of reading a sci-fi novel.
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). But 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.
What Remains of Edith Finch comes to mind for me.
In the game, you play Edith Finch going back to her family home. It was home to multiple generations of the Finch family. This family has a serious case of bad luck, and most of them didn't get very old. As Edith, you explore all of the rooms and see the final moments of the person who used to live there.
It is not a horror game - but it is haunting, in a sense. If you enjoy good stories and writing, give it a try. It's only about 2 hours, and best played in a single sitting. It's also on sale regularly.
Life is Strange
Spiritfarer
Titanfall 2
Hellblade
Red Dead 2
Hades
Oxenfree
Many 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.
I'm right with you on the other LiS series, except for the harbor one, I forgot the name of. None kept me engaged enough to finish.
Yeah, Oxenfree was great.
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
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 ❤️
SOMA still lives in my brain 10 years later.
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.
New Vegas, the writing of the dialoges are brilliant. Some of the funniest or straight up saddest stuff are both there.
Bioshock infinite, really pulled me in.
Come on, noone mentioning Planescape Torment so far?!
What changes the nature of a man?
Goosebumps.
Hell blade: Senua's Sacrifice.
The game itself helped me understand people, who are no longer with us, in a better way. The manner in which psychosis is presented is powerfully accurate, at least from an outsider perspective. It made me cry as it portrayed struggles in a manner truthful to the symptoms beyond the effects - the story and execution of it really gripped me.
Spiritfarer did this to me, I was very much invested in every character (except the bird and the bull, they can fuck off)
Legend of Mana
Final Fantasy XV... Usually I get wet eyes when the games do it right. But with FF15 I literally cried.
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.
Talos Principle is the best story I’ve played hands down.
Really? I thought it was ok at best.
Journey, there is no word but the story is so well written i
Cyberpunk 2077. Years since I booted it for the first time I am still at it
A lot of games are written pretty 'middle of the road' to get as much of a broad base as possible. A few stand out though.
The Last of Us really hit hard when I played it. I came to the end of that game feeling a little bit like I had an adoptive daughter, and feeling guilty that I had, to my mind, let her down.
There wasn't much 'writing' in it but Shadow of the Colossus also hit me pretty squarely in the chest.
Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice was another that had some real power to the writing. Go listen to this setup (stop at 2:47)and tell me that isn't made to give goosebumps.
Yeah, game writing gets thrown out the window 90% of the time because the writers far out pace the development team so it's commendable seeing the game writing being given some priority
All games from the Too the Moon series.
Rime is a fun but emotional one.
Citizen Sleeper isn't my usual type of game but I was hooked instantly by it all.
Blue Prince sure feels like it counts, our whole family is hooked, and has been playing it every day for about 2 weeks now. Even well after rolling credits.
In a similar vein, I'd have to say Hollow Knight and Outer Wilds. Together with Blue Prince, they all have a storytelling strategy of "you have to put some effort into getting the story out of it", but the effort makes every new discovery or revelation feel super rewarding.
Celeste is the one that comes to mind for a more traditional story that REALLY hit.
Persona 5 comes to mind, too. I was ENGROSSED in that story for months. Even if it went off the rails a couple times.
I'm also gonna shout-out Tales of Symphonia. That game was formative for me.
I see Tales of Symphonia, I instantly upvote.
This may seem like a cheeky answer, but Limbo.
Sometimes it's not about what you say, it's about what you don't.
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.
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.
Recent hit in this regard is Clair Obscure: Expedition 33. Incredible writing and incredible game overall.
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.
The Cat Lady is one I'd say stands out to me.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is the most recent example, but I also love the writing of Horizon. I wish it was more mature, but it's good writing overall. Excellent setup.
Thats a bit of a weird way of saying that, but I get what you mean.
For me, it has to be A Girl Who Chants Love at the Bound of This World YU-NO. The original PC-98 release.
Be warned, the game has very explicitly drawn and described sex scenes, some of which I found extremely disgusting, personally, but I understand it is a game from a totally different time and culture and I am not here to police any of that. Fortunately, I learned pretty early on that none of those scenes contain anything actually relevant to the story of the game, so I could just quickly click through them until the picture changed. Fair warning, if you aren't the kind of person that can overlook this, then you will probably only be focusing on the like, two parts that amount to maybe 5% of the whole game. But its pretty bad, at least in my opinion.
YU-NO took me no joke 80+ hours to beat, on a blind first playthrough. The story is about time travel, and features a very complex branching story, especially for the time the game came out. It has like 9 different endings. Basically the main character is trying to travel through time to find his father, who was a historian that disappeared one day. You get a device in a package from your father that basically acts like a Quick Save for the various timelines in the game that get created by the choices you make as a player. If you give or don't give a certain item to a certain character at a certain time, that could have consequences that put you onto a different timeline, and if you need to get to a different one then you can Quick Load back to a point you used a jewel at. As you go through each timeline, you pick up jewels that act as more Quick Save points in the story. You have to collect all the jewels to get the True Ending of the game, which literally is just a sequel game. The Epilogue of YU-NO is so fire I almost wish it was its own game, YU-NO 2. It was a twist I was not expecting, but loved.
Needless to say, that game had me hooked. And while there were a few parts that were beyond my own personal opinion of redemption, I am glad I could look past those parts to see the rest of the game. There was a remake in 2017 that IMO totally destroyed the art of the original game, which was unfortunate, but I also don't think it even censored or removed the sex scenes, so I couldn't even be happy about that. Its just an all around downgrade except that it is easier to get that in English since it is on Switch, Steam, and PS4.
Yeah, I've way more experience of being moved (sentimentally) by books than by videogames even tho I'm a game dev lol
Well, to be fair, YU-NO is a Classic Japanese Adventure game, which has come to be known as Visual Novel these days. Its basically a book in comparison to other video games.
Its hard to get excited about your work if it is also your hobby, I get you there.
Brigador has surprisingly excellent writing. And moreover, I mean it literally.
Between maps, you have a config interface where you pick a pilot, guns and a vehicle to put it all on. But you also have a window with Intel. You have to pay ingame money to unlock this Intel, in the same you have to pay to unlock pilots, guns, vehicles, maps. They prices are not negligible.
I unlocked every single piece of Intel, many times before I unlocked other more useful things, because it was that good.
I wanted to read more. I wanted to know more. I should point out that most of the Intel was self sufficient : it wasn't a huge story cut up in parts. I could read one Intel and there was no incentive to buy the next more expensive one to know the end.
But it was quality military sci-fi and so much lore building. And here and there, hints about cool equipment combos to try out in game (this pilot in that mech with those guns and gizmo).
It was a complete shock to find such quality in what is otherwise a shooter. Yes, many action RPGs have encyclopedias worth of lore, disseminated freely throughout the world, on items, etc. I think the presentation here helped. But I was genuinely surprised at how good and enjoyable it was to read. I literally sat down and few times spending like an hour reading through bits and pieces and going to play a map or two only so I'd have enough cash to unlock some more.
I hope I get to enjoy such surprisingly good writing in a game again in my gaming lifetime (and I've been playing for about 37 years, I should add).
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.
FADE, a pocket pc game with a shocking, emotional twist at the end. Worthy of a remake or movie.
Been replaying FFXII, and now I notice it is extremely rich in plot and worldbuilding, including a lot of non-verbal details.
Disco Elysium is, without a doubt, the best written game I've ever played. That game had me experience the entire rainbow of emotions.
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.
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'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.