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.
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