Oxenfree, A Night in the Woods, Afterparty, and Gris. Gris is a masterpiece when it comes to visuals but not story-heavy. The other three are entirely story.
Seconding Oxenfree. It’s one of the few multi-choice/multi-ending games where I was completely content with the ending I got, and didn’t feel like the game ever lied to me or ripped me off for choosing the “wrong” thing. I had stayed away from it for so long because I wasn’t ready to deal with choice anxiety that I get in a lot of games of that type, but for whatever reason, the game never made me feel like that.
Oh yes choice anxiety was definitely a thing. I think I felt that more with Afterparty and even played the game a second time to try to alter things but at the end of the day, I realized it’s not that serious and simply enjoying the game made it a better experience.
Returnal, Resident Evil REmakes, most Giant Bomb games, Firewatch, Hellblade…
If you liked Alan Wake, definitely give the RE remakes and Hellblade a shot, and don’t sleep on Firewatch. In fact, Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice is probably one of the most thoughtful and atmospheric experiences in gaming (at least in the field of 3rd person, pseudo action games).
I second Resident Evil games. But, they have multiple ends that require replay the games or a large portion of them. You can watch the endings on YouTube though. But iirc, RE VII, has a whole different portion of game influenced by a choice you make, than make you replay that whole part and it can be long.
It is not a normal suggestion because the base game is probably the most pay to win mmo that has lasted more than a year or two. But both versions of Runescape (both old school and Runescape 3) have a game mode called ironman mode.
Ironman mode is an official account type that you can create where you can not trade other players items or money. Everything is earned and gathered yourself. If you want to make a bow you need to gather the flax to spin a bow string and chop logs to fletch an unstrung bow and then string it.
It is a slower mmo with most skills in the game having methods to train where you don’t need to pay much attention and you can mostly watch youtube.
Both games also have very mechanically different and difficult combat encounters you can work your way up to.
Maxing out every skill in the game takes year(s) to do and there are hundreds of incredibly unique quests that in my own opinion set the bar for mmo questing. There are no kill 30 boar quests or fetch quests (really) they are mostly very in depth stories with character archs and so much lore if you are into that.
Would recommend OS over RS3, because much as I love archaeology, RS3 is overmonetised (I think most of the community agrees with that?), and that seems like a big part of what OP wanted to get away from.
This is a fair take. However, stories in games (for the most part) are no different than cheap pulp novels, romance fics, or the twenty billion christmas romance movies: you know what you’re getting and it’s not super in-depth. Sometimes I do want to turn my brain off for a story. I won’t pretend it’s good, but I still enjoy it.
Seriously though, I know you said “for the most part,” but I just want to emphasize that there are absolutely story-focused games out there. Games I’d even describe as downright literary, where the entire point is to tell a compelling story and explore some heady themes. One recent one I played like this was Pentiment, which explores some really interesting history and has a lot to say about religion, community, fallibility, family, etc…
And, I mean, lots of other people have already mentioned Disco Elysium and I could write an essay about it but anyone who hasn’t played it should just watch this Jacob Geller video instead.
Fair enough. I absolutely remember running randomly generated dungeons from the back of the 1st edition DM’s guide, and the players dutifully mapping it out on graph paper. No cohesive dungeon theme, just all random monsters and such.
It was kind of fun, like playing Diablo.
Of course this also reminds me of the first time I ran Pacesetters Chill. A single monster… investigations, a false finish. My player’s loved it. This Dungeon Bot is the complete opposite that, for sure, but it’s still kind of fun, like just mowing through random monsters.
#Your favorite game’s “awesome story” robs the player of a basic sense of agency
It is generally not awesome for the player character to join a cult, agree to assassinate their boss’s boss, cheat on their life partner, pick a side in a major power struggle, voluntarily inject themselves with an experimental nano-fluid, etc, without the player’s consent.
Right, so…please tell me a narrative medium that allows this. Somehow movies, books, comics, manga, and literal storytelling all get a pass on this?
I can sort of nod along with everything else, agreeing that there is some truth in the spewing. This statement is so pants-on-head foolish that every other assertion you make gets dragged beneath the water and drowns with chains made of the last page of shitty choose-your-own-adventure book. And for that level of strength in the chains to work, those assertions have to be pretty crappy.
Sorry, but no medium of media allows for agency. I don’t care if you have some of the best writing in a game (whether that means Planescape: Torment, Baldur’s Gate II, Disco Elysium, whatever), or if you want to go with the old choose-your-own-adventure books, but there is ultimately little to no player agency. If you want player agency in a game, you have one choice, and it isn’t a video game: TTRPGs. Even ChatGPT can’t match what a good GM can do, because they can allow you to break the mechanics of the game or add mechanics on the fly to fit what a player wants to do. A GM can literally respond to something a game creator never imagined within seconds. I want to see Planescape or Disco Elysium react to a player doing something they thought of that the game creator didn’t imagine. Buuuulllllshit. Player agency my ass.
Also, as the OP obviously fails to mention any games that he thinks is worthy of being an ‘awesome story’, I’m calling this as a troll/bait post.
Soooo… you’re telling me there’s a game whose story you really love that avoids all these tropes completely? Hmmm… How about Stardew Valley? The premise isn’t entirely unrealistic (leaving a boring corporate job for a dream hobby farm), the story unfolds on its own, you get to decide who you side with, who you become close to and hang out with. Or perhaps you only enjoy franchises that have volumes and volumes of lore behind them to make up for game campaign plots that are too straightforward (Lord of the Rings, Starcraft for example).
Or (like me) your favourite games have little to no story at all. American Truck Simulator, Bloons TD, Age of Empires, Satisfactory, Cities Skylines, Transport Fever are a bunch of my favourite games to play.
If you believe everything you wrote in this post, you are quite hard to please. A game’s plot can’t be too straightforward, yet any surprise twist seems shoehorned in the game. Telling the story through the environment is walking simulator, telling the story through quests is MMORPG Simulator, telling it through Textboxes/Cutscenes is Reading Simulator. Someone hiding something about their character until later in the game is unrealistic, being taken for a ride in a fantasy world is “losing your basic sense of agency”.
Are you playing to try to have fun, escape real life for a bit, or are you playing just to tell people you beat the game? I like games over films and books because you are part of the action and the story, but it’s also part of the game design how far your choices ultimately take you in the world, sometimes they affect everything, sometimes it has no bearing and you’re doomed with what the game has in store.
I just finished Trails in the Sky SC at just over 90 hours playtime. I didn’t even 100% it. I have to admit. I didn’t even much enjoy the first half or so. It mostly ended strong, but I was starting to get a little sick of kicking the same bad guys’ asses over and over only to have them declare they’re not even using their full strength in the post-fight cutscene before they mysteriously disappear to inevitably come back later.
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