Video Games That Regularly Present Tough Moral Choices

Whether it’s action-oriented, moment-to-moment decision-making in platformers of first-person shooters or picking which ending to go with (before reloading a save and checking out the others), choices are a unique feature of video games. Most gamers love to make choices in games, but conceiving of and programming in a billion different decision-making points is one way to feature-creep a game into oblivion.

That’s why game studios have to pick their moments carefully and make those choices count. However, a few games have taken the concept of moral and ethical decision-making into the core of their gameplay, throwing their players into quandary after moral quandary.

Frostpunk

Reinventing Child Slavery To Save Humanity From An Icy Grave

Many strategy games have a tendency to abstract away the human beings working at the behest of the player’s designs. In Sid Meier’s Civilization, warriors and builders are simply expendable resources used to gain territory or complete projects (which isn’t too far removed from how most world leaders view geopolitical issues today). However, Frostpunk puts players in the decision-making hot seat and close to the drama of suffering, frostbite, and starvation by forcing them to confront the immediate consequences of their choices, watching citizens die or revolt when they’re pushed too far.

Even choices that may protect the majority of people have to be bought by enacting brutal declarations of law, forcing workers to pull a 24-hour shift, putting children to work in the mines after a sudden cold snap, and banishing the sick into the white wasteland to save the healthy. Completing a run of Frostpunk without crossing a few personal red lines is nearly impossible, and rigidly clinging to the moral high ground means having to confront problems later than means crossing even further or watching the last embers of humanity burn out in the cold.

Disco Elysium

An Ideological Minefield in a Shattered World

This politically-charged cRPG doesn’t have a combat system and so does not have many life-or-death choices, or so players might think. Disco Elysium directly grapples with the ideological forces and mechanisms that also govern our world, both overtly and subtly expressed. It dives deep into exploring topics like the evil of unrestrained capitalism and its one-sided propaganda war, collective action, markets, racism, colonialism, and just about every other topic each participant at the Thanksgiving dinner table prays will not make an appearance this year (besides that one conspiracy-brained uncle).

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The choices that the cop makes on his journey through a post-revolution Revachol have consequences that may not be world-changing, but thanks to excellent writing and worldbuilding, the impact of every decision is smashed directly against the player’s gut, with a flake of humor or good measure. Disco Elysium tests the player’s ideological and moral resolve constantly, not just by making decisions for the battered and broken population of Revachol but through the cop’s internal battle with his own fractured psyche, personal demons, and the trauma of being a human being during an economic and social era when all that is solid melts into air.

Papers, Please

The Life Or Death Plays Of A Bureaucrat

In Papers, Please, players step into the unenviable role of a border control agent in an authoritarian country ravaged by poverty, war, and terror. Each day, the player must decide who gets to cross and who is denied entry based on the law, their moral compass, or the nutritional needs of their own starving family.

In addition to staying alive and staying in the good graces of their government superiors, the well-being of the player’s family adds another layer of pressure, especially when faced with tempting opportunities for corruption. Navigating the daily, often mutually exclusive demands of the law and justice becomes a constant moral tightrope where every decision can have dire and unexpected consequences.

Fallout: New Vegas

No Best Options In The Nevada Wasteland

Something most games that force players to make regular moral choices have in common is their sanctity of human life. It’s hard to emphasize the values of good and evil when the primary gameplay loop has the player pile up hundreds of dead bodies, whether their deaths come with justifications or not. However, Fallout: New Vegas, with its lackadaisical attitude to violence and suffering, might be the exception to this rule (although it is possible to complete the game without a single kill. The first major choice players encounter is deciding whether to protect a town from bandits or join the bandits in their conquest. Nothing groundbreaking so far. However, as the story unfolds, the player is constantly confronted with grayer and grayer moral choices.

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For example, at Helios One, the player must decide whether to restore power to the entire region (with poor output for everyone), direct it to one faction, or turn the solar plant into a deadly weapon. Later, the player is tasked with choosing who will control the Hoover Dam, siding with the ineffectual but democratic New California Republic, the efficient but authoritarian Caesar’s Legion, the brilliant but autocratic Mr. House, or no one, leaving the fate of the wasteland to the anarchic roll of the dice. Each option reshapes the future of the entire region, and each has compelling philosophical cases to make about their visions for the future, but none come without significant compromises.

This War Of Mine

Each Level A Lesson About The True Horrors Of War

Although the backdrop of war appears a lot in video games, very few are able to accurately portray the hell of living through an era of open and continuous warfare. This War of Mine immerses players in the unsettling experience of controlling civilians trapped in a besieged city, where survival hinges not on ballistic heroics but on the unglamorous struggle to find food, shelter, medicine, and safety. Dark choices are not made once in a while but are a fundamental part of the gameplay loop.

Some games enable players to do things that would, in real life, give them either horrific PTSD or incurable levels of denial and cognitive dissonance, whereas This War Of Mine will make players realize that making choices in intolerable conditions isn’t just a matter of checking in on basic ethics. Sometimes, staying alive means murdering an innocent young mother after getting caught stealing the sparse medical supplies in her cabinet.

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