Your most difficult choice in a game

Hey everyone. What is the toughest choice you have ever made in a video game? The genre doesn't matter, as long as you had a real choice at some point which you had to stop at to think for several minutes (or a night) before making a decisions, or in the case of time limited choices, something which felt like a real gut punch to decide on and you felt conflicted about. Games are really the only medium where choice is an integral part of how the story is experienced, so I'm really curious about your answers.

@lostsol's excellent blog on Disco Elysium is what sparked the question, as it reminded me of when I played it in late 2019. When I play role playing/story heavy games, I like being an asshole who provokes conflict as I think it makes for the most interesting story, and it's not something you see in much fiction. Luckily for me, Disco Elysium is almost custom built to play an asshole so I dove in headfirst. I made my character a reflexes/strength focused meathead, who feels bigoted due to the culture surrounding him and needing to latch onto something through his alcoholism, but I also wanted him to grow and develop through the story.

Everything was going according to plan (though I was cringing inwardly at some of the stuff he said), till after one too many rants, he had a rooftop encounter with his mind. The bigot part of it, which gave him and option to become a fascist. At this point, he hadn't been strongly political in any direction. He was mostly selfish and feeble minded, so I didn't grasp what was really going on, and what the consequences of the choice would be. On one hand, I was really curious about where the story would go, and what becoming a fascist would entail. I felt like not many people probably became fascist, and I liked the idea of seeing more exclusive content. On the other hand, you know, fascism. I was also genuinely unsure about what the investigator I had been playing as up to this point was actually in this deep, and I felt like accepting might stymie his progression.

I debated the choice for a good 10-15 minutes, but ultimately decided on... declining. I wouldn't have felt good about making him fascist despite everything, and he did reduce his fascist tendencies after this encounter. In the end, he didn't join any political movement as he was focused on the task at hand. Still, I sometimes regret my choice, as it would have been really interesting to see, and the choice doesn't matter too much in the wider sphere of things.

The ending choices in Life is Strange and it's prequel, Before the Storm. The choice in the first game is basically an over the top trolley problem, while the second has much lower stakes. But both games they do a very good job of making the choices feel impactful, even when they're not about life or death situations.

I've got two. The first being the final choice of Subsurface Circular. I took minutes walking through my thought process on that one and weighing the consequences, something that almost never happens to me with video games. The second being the final choice in Life Is Strange. I knew immediately what my choice was going to be, but that didn't make it any easier to actually choose it.

When first playing Chrono Cross, I went against every natural impulse of my own and every inclination of the game’s own narrative not to save Kid because I was still far more eager to find out whether Guile was Magus and generally what the Chrono Cross of it all would wind up being. Little did I know the answer was largely “not at all” but it’s still impressive to me that Square so willingly hid some of its best side missions and certainly best party member behind a completely optional choice most gamers would likely not make.

Hmm. The end of the first season of Tellyale's Walking Dead was tough. Their Batman series had some good ones too.

There's a series of choices in Lisa: The Painful that are at first implictly framed as "noble self-sacrifice to protect others" vs "Others are harmed/killed to maintain your (Brad's) power level". But it soon becomes obvious that the former isn't the case at all and escalates to the point where it's an impossible policy to maintain.

The one that immediately comes to mind for me is something that happened when I was playing the first Knights of the Old Republic game. I was on Tatooine doing my best good-guy-noble-selfless-peace-loving-jedi routine, and to that end had labored to my utmost to broker a peace between some Tusken Raiders and moisture farmers. I'd finally negotiated a peaceful solution and was just about to leave the Tusken encampment when I happened upon a group of Jawas who said they'd been enslaved and begged me to free them. I knew that letting them go would cause every Tusken Raider to turn on me, necessitating my killing them all and destroying the peace I'd done so much to broker. It forced me into the position of weighing the relative worth of people's lives. No matter what decision I made, it would amount to deciding one group of lives was more important than another. In the end I had to conclude the lives of the enslaved were worth more than the slavers, freed the Jawas, and killed every Tusken Raider in the game. The experience left me shaken, to say the least, not just from the violence, but the futile attempt to impose morality on an amoral world.

One of the toughest choices I had to make in a video game was in "Life is Strange". It was a decision that would have a significant impact on the story and left me feeling conflicted. I had to stop and think for a while before finally making my choice.

@freemeerkat: Care to say what choice it was? You are free to use spoiler text. Is it the one at the end of episode 2?

I really like the choice system in that game because it lets you see the immediate aftermath but not the long term consequences. It makes the first season of Life is Strange superior to all other narrative heavy choice games (including other Life is Strange games).

It was a difficult choice in GTA 5. In one of the missions of the main story, when the protagonist is on his way to his father, a friend calls him and asks for help. And then there is a choice to help his friend or come to his father. It doesn't seem like a difficult choice, but when I made the choice to help my friend, the main character gets a call and is told that his father has been murdered. And the storyline then develops radically differently. Even despite the fact that the game is kiddions mod menu, the end of the storyline does not change.

Honestly at the end of The Last Of Us, I let that last scene go for ages, I didn't feel like I should have had to make the concluding action. Didn't feel true to me.

Fallout 3's DLC The Pitt. When you finally find out the thing you are stealing from the slaver kingpin during the slave rebellion is his infant child. I actually had to pause the game and collect myself to make the decision. In the end I wasn't able to do it. Something about that revelation was just too much for me.

For me, I'd say buying the right virtual race car in iRacing for each series, because they have advantages and disadvantages in terms of performance.

Whether to blow up the possibly infected shuttle headed for Earth in Prey 2017.

Choosing which one of your buddies gets to live in the beginning of Wolfenstein: New Order.

I remember at the end of Season Two of the Walking Dead, when you have to pick whether to let Clem go to the city or not, I literally spent about twelve hours AGONISING over it. I went for a walk in nature to see if it inspired me either way. I have never felt like that with a game before or since then- It was a masterpiece.

Truth be told, I don't even remember what choice I picked in the end, but I remember my heart being wrenched over which option to pick for nearly a full day

The end of Life is Strange and choosing whether to let fate take its course and allow Chloe to die, or screw everything and save her, but destroy the town Arcadia Bay as the result of a massive storm for defying fate. I ended up choosing to let Chloe die to save the whole town and it sucked. Not only because I grew to like Chloe as a character, but because the ultimate lesson of the game was that while Max has the power to bend time, its ultimately worthless because she can't fight fate, or she can at the risk of great loss.

There is also one in The Walking Dead TellTale series. I don't remember if it was Season 2 or 3, but you have to choose to either side with Jane a new girl Clem met or Kenny from Season 1 who seems to have lost it and gone crazy. I ended up choosing Jane. Turns out it didn't matter because both of them die early during the next Season leaving Clem alone again to survive with Kenny's adopted son.