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PC games have been foisting tricky decisions on players since back in 1985 when Ultima 4 made us navigate a moral compass with eight different spokes to prove we were Britannia's best boy. But the Big Decision Era really kicked off in 2003 when Knights of the Old Republic made us pick between the light side and the dark, and every videogame was stuffed with choices people could fill their blogs arguing about. (We all had a blog in 2003. It was the law.)
Those obligatory Big Decisions didn't always come off as tricky as they were supposed to. Fable's cartoonish morality was more of a toy to play with than a series of dilemmas to wrestle with, and BioShock making you choose between being a child murderer and a child non-murderer wasn't really a choice at all. Especially since the good playthrough offered even more rewards, albeit slightly delayed. And let's not even talk about the daft ending choice of Far Cry 3.
Other developers nailed it, though. BioWare and Telltale in particular made Big Decisions their calling card, and we kept coming back for more. While some didn't land, or didn't have the impactful consequences we were hoping for, they still felt difficult in the moment.
Here are the toughest choices we've ever made in PC games. Watch out for spoilers, especially if you haven't played The Walking Dead, Life is Strange, Dishonored, or the Mass Effect trilogy.
Prey
Blow up a shuttle full of civilians to stop the infestation?
Mimics in D&D are kind of annoying. You think you're going to get some sweet loot out of a treasure chest or sit on a comfy chair, then suddenly it's got teeth and it wants to eat your hand and/or your bottom.
Mimics in Prey are even worse. They're aliens who can disguise themselves as any object, and they're the leading edge of an infestation of beings called typhon. If a single one makes it to Earth the whole planet is screwed. They've already taken over the Talos I space station you're trapped on in Prey, and your mission is to explore the station until you get access to the self-destruct controls to prevent the typhon's spread.
Partway through, you find out that a shuttle called the Advent left Talos I on a routine trip to Earth half an hour before the infestation was discovered. Maybe the Advent's free of mimics, maybe it's not. You've got no way of telling, but fortunately it hasn't reached Earth yet and you can blow it up before it does at the press of a button.
There's no reward or punishment for either decision, though you can do some research and find out just enough details about the passengers to make you feel real bad about obliterating them. Prey opens with a psychological test where you're presented with the classic trolley problem, then makes you follow through on it when you know the names of the people on the tracks.
The Walking Dead
Who do you feed?
The Walking Dead is the poster child for difficult choices in videogames, and Clementine is the poster child for children in videogames. When you jam a pitchfork into a bad man's chest, she's there, and has been watching the whole time with her big remembering eyes. Decisions you might have made without thinking become fraught because now you know an eight-year-old girl is watching you like a hawk, learning how to survive the zombie apocalypse based on what you do.
While there are plenty of choices about who to save and whether to hack off an infected limb, the one that'll probably keep you agonizing the longest seems less immediately fraught. There are 10 survivors and you've only got four food items. Who do you give them to?
Some of the survivors are kids, and some of them are adults who need the energy to keep working on your makeshift base's defenses. Some of them are friends who've earned your trust, and others are jerks you may dislike but could win over so they have your back in the future. It's a string of tough calls, and once you've handed out the first three items you're faced with another choice. Do you keep the last meal for yourself, or give it away too? For this choice Clementine isn't the only one watching. The whole group has their eyes on you, and they will remember this.
The Banner Saga
Defend the bridge, destroy the bridge, or flee?
The Banner Saga begins as it means to go on. It tells you to make sure this nice boy named Egil stays alive, then pops him on the battlefield, and after you've struggled to protect him there, it presents a narrative choice where he can immediately drop dead if you select the wrong option.
Throughout this cross between Oregon Trail, Final Fantasy Tactics, and that one Tom Cardy song about how much walking there is in The Lord of the Rings, you'll face plenty of difficult decisions for the caravan of refugees you're trying to protect and the named characters who protect them in turn-based battles. Those decisions pile up toward the end of the first game in a climactic siege in the city of Einartoft.
The last city of the varl (horned Viking giants slowly going extinct), Einartoft is pretty special to its people and their king. Especially the bridge that leads into it, a feat of varl engineering the king is protective of. That bridge is unfortunately being flooded by your enemies, the dredge, and your life would be a lot easier if you could just demolish the thing.
So begins a siege presented as several days of exhausting decision points. You can march onto the bridge to help defend it, tell your wizard it's time to blow the supports, or just book it out of town. Maybe today you can march up to the Great Hall to try to talk the king into letting you destroy it without having to fight through a bunch of varl, or maybe today you can help the defenders without having to fight alongside them. Maybe today is the day one of those choices results in Egil dying, even if you shepherded him all the way here through hours of other events where the poor boy can pop his clogs.
Dishonored
Kill your targets, or make them suffer a fate worse than death?
Making "high chaos" choices in Dishonored, like murdering your political opponents, is discouraged in several ways. The higher the chaos the further the plague spreads, resulting in more rats in the street and more guards too. Given that you can possess rats as a convenient way to get around, and killing guards with your cool Outsider powers is the most fun part of the game, maybe that's not such a huge discouragement. However, the higher the chaos gets, the more disturbing the pictures your daughter Emily draws of you become. And that's why I backed down from a high-chaos playthrough.
What makes it tough is that the low-chaos ways of dealing with your opponents are often worse than just assassinating them. In one case you leave a man with his head shaved and tongue severed, forced to serve as a slave in the salt mine he used to own. Then there's Lady Boyle. If you choose not to murder her ladyship, the alternative is to kidnap her and hand her over to the stalker who is obsessed with her, and will take her to his private island where he believes she'll learn to love him. Eventually.
You know what, maybe Emily's portraits could stand to get a little disturbed. It's normal for kids to go through a bit of a Tim Burton phase, right?
Mass Effect 2
Destroy or reprogram the heretic geth?
In the first Mass Effect it's pretty easy to stick to the Paragon path. If you make Renegade choices Commander Shepherd is just as likely to act like a xenophobic nutbar as the rulebreaking badass we want them to be. BioWare learned its lesson by Mass Effect 2, where some of the choices become properly nailbiting. For instance, what do you do with the reaper-aligned heretic geth?
These sentient robots have found themselves fighting for the species-deleting reapers because of a bug in their programming, but one that cannot be completely removed. Once you figure this out, the Paragon choice is to temporarily rewrite their programming to make them peaceful, knowing that as soon as another reaper comes along they'll be just as susceptible to its commands and resume being murderbots.
Destroying the heretic geth is the Renegade choice, but it's also much more practical. Let them live and you'll just have to fight them again later after they've attacked your friends the quarians again. In the long run, the Paragon choice results in more death. But hey, at least you earned some blue points for it.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
Kill or free the tree spirit?
Geralt hates being forced to pick the lesser of two evils, which is why The Witcher games love making him do exactly that. The Whispering Hillock quest is a perfect example. First, it introduces a crew of cheeky orphans who live in a swamp with their "Gran". (Their line, "Gran! Gran! Bumblebee bit Yagna in the arse!" is one of the funniest things in the entire game.) Gran's also a servant of the three creepy crones, the Ladies of the Wood, who might be able to tell you where Ciri is.
The crones demand a boon before sharing what they know, sending you to help Downwarren, a village where the locals cut a deal with the crones in return for protection and "a giant pot of boiled meat" once a year. Downwarren's ealdorman wants you to kill a tree spirit under a hill because it's been slaughtering villagers. (Villagers who started clearing the hill's trees on behalf of the crone, of course.)
Travel under the hill and the tree spirit will beg for its life, saying it was imprisoned here by the crones in the first place. It also tells you those loveable orphans have been kidnapped by the crones for a feast. That giant pot of boiled meat starts to seem a bit more sinister. If you free the tree spirit, it promises to rescue the orphans.
It's true to its word if you do, though it does also have its revenge on the people of Downwarren. And the crones take their revenge by cursing Gran, which is a problem because she's the Bloody Baron's estranged wife, and when the curse kills her he takes his life. As a final knock-on effect, without him around to control them, the Bloody Baron's men go on a rampage harassing the area's peasants. If you kill the tree spirit instead the people of Downwarren and Gran get to live, though the trauma sends her mad, and all those mischievous orphans end up in the pot. This is why Geralt hates having to choose.
Batman: The Telltale Series
Is it worth owing a favor to the Joker?
Telltale's Batman is set early in his career, which means your decisions about whether to play a brutal Dark Knight or a compassionate Caped Crusader also shape your villains. You meet characters like Two-Face and Catwoman before their relationships with you have solidified, and get to choose how they play out.
This version of Bruce Wayne has never even heard of the Joker, so when his political opponents have him declared insane and locked in Arkham Asylum, with his only ally as a mysterious guy named "John Doe" who just happens to have chalk-white skin and green hair, how do you treat him? Do you stay in character, grateful for the help as Bruce would be in the situation, or does your knowledge of who John Doe will become shape how you react? What if that distrust and mistreatment makes him even worse in the future?
John Doe is basically Brad Pitt in Twelve Monkeys to your Bruce Willis, helping you survive and ultimately escape the asylum. He just wants one thing in return: an unspecified favor, at some undetermined point in the future. In the moment it doesn't matter whether you admit you owe the guy or let him down, but in the long run you'll have it hanging over your head.
According to Telltale's stats screen, 49.5% of players choose to owe the favor, while 50.5% don't. It's not as life-or-death as many of the other choices Telltale put in front of us, but it's one of the clearest splits down the middle in their entire catalogue.
Dragon Age: Origins
Who becomes king of the dwarves?
Fight, fight, intractable moral quandary, fight, fight. That's Dragon Age: Origins pretty much from beginning to end, interspersing combat with such knuckle-gnawing choices as what to do with a guard whose entire happy family life is a succubus hallucination, whether to kill or spare Flemeth, the ultimate fate of the Architect in the Awakening expansion, and who rules Orzammar.
When you arrive in the dwarven kingdom of Orzammar, you find a realm divided. You need the dwarves' help fighting the Blight, but they're in no position to assist until they have a new king. The quests you undertake in Orzammar influence the standing of either the honorable traditionalist Harrowmont or the scheming progressive Bhelen, and in the end it's up to you who wears the crown.
Bhelen's support for lower-class casteless dwarves may be to your liking, especially if you played the Dwarf Commoner origin and come from humble beginnings yourself. His being a murdering bastard may not be to your liking, especially if you played the Dwarf Noble (one of the best origins), which makes him your brother and betrayer. But while Harrowmont is a more decent chap, his staid conservative outlook will lock Orzammar into isolationism and division, a long-term negative that impacts the entire world.
Frostpunk
Child labor, yea or nay?
It's pretty easy to be broadly anti-child labor in your day-to-day life. It doesn't come up real often, you know? And then Frostpunk puts you in charge of a bunch of Victorian-era Brits facing a new Ice Age and points out that if you don't enact child labor laws, a third of your population will be idle when they could be shoveling coal into the machines that keep everyone alive.
If you don't crack open the Book of Laws to enforce the one that says Little Timmy needs to work the furnace, you'll have to build a bunch of space-consuming shelters for the kids instead. If you do pass the child labor law, you'll have to face the consequences once they start being injured at work. Their parents aren't going to be too happy about Little Timmy being mangled by the machinery.
Like every decision in Frostpunk it's lose-lose, and yet we keep coming back for more. Just like Oliver Twist famously did—at least, until the incident.
Fallout 3
Leave the Wasteland to wither, or force a man to live as a tree?
Harold's a recurring character across the early Fallout games, an irascible mutant you meet in the first Fallout, Fallout 2, and Fallout 3. (He's also in Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel, but we don't talk about that.) In the second game his mutation's progressed to the point a twig starts growing out his head, which he calls Bob. By Fallout 3 he's more plant than man, rooted to the ground and surrounded by trees that have grown from his seeds in a settlement called Oasis.
The treeminders who live around Bob have a pretty decent life by Wasteland standards. Some of them want to spread that bounty even further, with a special sap that will make Bob grow faster and turn the desert green. Others are concerned about drawing attention, worried that Harold might be experimented on by unscrupulous sorts, arguing that his growth should be slowed instead. Meanwhile, Harold is sick of being trapped inside a tree, and begs for death.
So what do you do? Grant Harold his wish, dooming Oasis and the one chance the Capital Wasteland has of becoming something more than radioactive ash? Or ignore the crusty old coot's demand and make him blossom at the risk of drawing the Enclave's attention? Or try to walk the line down the middle, keeping Harold trapped inside Bob and Oasis safe, at the cost of putting off the Wasteland's regeneration for even longer?
