Games

The Best Stories In PC Exclusive Games

Published

1 month ago

October 25, 2024

Christoph Rediske

Key Takeaways

PC gaming offers some of the best narratives with games like Pathologic and The Beginner’s Guide.
World of Warcraft and Half-Life 2 stand out for their immersive narratives and long-lasting impact.
Classic PC games like System Shock 2, Planescape: Torment, and Deus Ex offer deep, intricate narratives.

As the oldest and most reputable platform for gaming, the PC has developed a long and storied history of delivering some of the very best games ever made. When it comes to narratives, the PC platform is a proven breeding ground for some of the best.

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Narrative adventures and story-rich RPGs have become increasingly popular in the gaming landscape through the years.

Whether it be fourth-wall-breaking meta-masterpieces or philosophical inquiries into the nature of being through the lens of a CRPG, these are some of the best stories in PC gaming.

As a note, these games were all exclusive to PC on release, but some have now been ported to consoles.

8 Pathologic

A Rampant Sickness

Pathologic

Released: June 9, 2005
Developer(s): Ice-Pick Lodge

Beginning as a cult classic game after its release in 2005 and slowly becoming one of the beloved indie darlings of the entire gaming world, Pathologic is a game that almost defies description due to its sheer strangeness, but it is beloved precisely due to its weirdness.

Gamers inhabit the role of three interconnecting characters as a plague takes over a small strange town deep in the Russian countryside. To fix the plague, players must survive brutal difficulty, zombies, and monsters that break the very fabric of reality. It’s a wild experience, but one well worth playing, as well as its sequel/remake which crafts an equally brilliant atmosphere.

7 The Beginner’s Guide

A Tutorial With No Guard Rails

OpenCritic: Top Critic Rating:73/100 Critics Recommend:75%

Released: October 1, 2015
Developer(s): Everything Unlimited Ltd.

While most might put something like The Stanley Parable as the best fourth-wall-breaking meta-narrative game, The Beginner’s Guide has always stood as a more emotionally poignant and creatively focused narrative, even if it is largely underappreciated by gamers at large.

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Players play… themselves, as they explore the unfinished levels of a talented game designer and the developer notes left behind by their friends. As is expected, things start to get very meta, very quickly, resulting in one of the most memorable PC narratives imaginable.

6 World of Warcraft

Azeroth Unleashed

Systems

Released: November 23, 2004

Gamers have a wide variety of opinions on World of Warcraft, which is appropriate for a game that has been running for almost twenty years. Regardless, it’s hard to deny just how totemic the game’s narrative is, and just how influential it has been ever since release.

Attempting to sum up the story of World of Warcraft in a tidy sentence is essentially impossible, but needless to say, players take control of a hero as they navigate through the dangerous world of Azeroth, conquering world-ending threats and tracking literally decades-long storylines. It’s a lot of work, but it pays off with one of the grandest fantasy epics of them all.

5 Half-Life 2

Gordon’s Odyssey

Released: November 16, 2004

There is perhaps no more influential game on first-person shooters than Half-Life 2, released all the way back in 2004 but still holding up remarkably well in the present day, with a near-identical engine being used for popular platforms like Garry’s Mod.

Half-Life 2 continues the story of Gordon Freeman, now in a dystopian future where the alien Combine has taken over the world. Gordon must fight back against this threat with a trusty crowbar in hand as Valve’s sci-fi epic twists and turns towards one of gaming’s most infamous but effective cliffhangers ever put to pixel, and that’s not even counting the game’s crazy cut content.

4 System Shock 2

SHODAN’s Pleasure

System Shock 2

Systems

Immersive Sim games are well known for their engaging narratives because they implicitly encourage players to read as much incidental text as possible and thoroughly explore a world to let the environment do a lot of the narrative heavy lifting. System Shock 2 is the prototype for all immersive sims to follow.

In System Shock 2, gamers play as a soldier awoken from cryogenic sleep aboard the Von Braun in the year 2114 which has been overtaken by the malevolent AI known as SHODAN. The game is an incredible mix of sci-fi, cyberpunk, and horror, and is well worth playing for any fans of the immersive sim genre. Following a critically acclaimed remake of the original, there may even be a remake of System Shock 2 on the way as well.

3 I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream

Far From A Silent Story

I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream

Systems

Released: October 31, 1995
Developer: Cyberdreams, The Dreamers Guild

As one of the relatively few games based on horror books, I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream is based on the short story of the same name by Harlan Ellison about a planet-sized computer called AM torturing the final five humans left alive.

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These story-driven horror titles offer dynamic, non-linear narratives that adapt to player choices, providing branching paths and multiple endings.

The video game adaptation doesn’t just adapt the book, but tangibly expands on it with the contributions of Ellison himself, resulting in a story that might actually be an improvement on the original, diving deep into the backstories of each of the five humans and crafting a interwoven narrative that is still as gut-wrenching as the original, but with even more depth.

2 Planescape: Torment

Excavate The Heavens And Hells

Planescape: Torment

Released: December 12, 1999
Developer(s): Black Isle Studios
OpenCritic Rating: Mighty

Many modern gamers have discovered the joys of the CRPG through Baldur’s Gate 3, but veterans of the genre frequently point to 1999’s Planescape: Torment as the very best of the genre, taking the world of D&D and going further than any game had gone before.

Gamers play as the Nameless One, an amnesiac exploring the planes of the D&D cosmology alongside an eclectic crew of companions as they struggle to reclaim their memory and figure out who they were before. What results is a narrative with incredible depth, functioning one part as a philosophical thought experiment, and one part as the closest games have ever gotten to the depth of literature’s greatest novels. It’s incredible, and well worth playing for gamers looking for a meaty story to dig into.

1 Deus Ex

The Immersive Sim Bible

Deus Ex

Systems

Released: June 23, 2000
Developer(s): Ion Storm

As if it could be anything else. While System Shock 2 precedes Deus Ex and is considered one of the first classics of the immersive sim, Deus Ex is widely considered to be the pinnacle of the immersive sim genre that is yet to be beaten.

Gamers take control of JC Denton, an agent for a future organization in 2052 dedicated to hunting down terrorists in the midst of a deadly pandemic known as the Gray Death. The game is a masterful depiction of conspiracy thriller storytelling, weaving a story of such depth and complexity that it takes more than a few playthroughs to fully grasp the totality of it. It’s easily one of the best conspiracy thrillers ever written, and it’s still the very best game in the entire Deus Ex franchise.

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