Players often have to do horrible things to finish a mission or task, and the game will sometimes make them feel bad about it.
In many video games, you have to kill monsters or people to move the story forward. But sometimes, players are forced to attack people who don’t deserve to be killed in the player’s eyes. This makes the player feel very bad about what they did in order to finish the game.
A lot of games take advantage of this guilt, either on purpose or by accident, by making players wonder if they’re doing the right thing or try to find ways to get around the goals they’re given. So, these games are the most memorable because they make players feel bad about killing people.
Undertale
If a player hasn’t tried to play Undertale in a peaceful way, they are less likely to feel bad about taking lives as they move through the story. But players who have tried hard not to kill anyone in the game have had a hard time in later playthroughs when they had to kill someone to get a different ending.
This isn’t helped by the fact that players can get close to different characters during the Pacifist run or by the fact that killing some characters makes you feel bad. For example, the conversation between San and the player after the player kills San’s brother will be remembered for the rest of the game.
Bioshock
Most players won’t feel bad about beating the splicers, but the Big Daddies, the game’s mascot, are often a source of guilt. The only thing these creatures do in the game is protect Little Sisters while wearing old-fashioned divers.
Big Daddies won’t attack players as long as they stay far away, but it’s a necessary evil if they want to get the Adam the Little Sisters harvest. After beating the Big Daddies, players still feel guilty because they have to decide whether to kill a little girl for all her Adam or just take a little bit to set her free.
Horizon: Forbidden West
Even though they are robots, many of the machines that Aloy and the players have to fight act a lot like animals. As players slowly take parts off of different monsters they face, these machines start to shut down and limp away, trying not to lose.
But in Horizon: Forbidden West, the Plowhorn, which the Utaru worship as their land-gods, is a machine that often makes players feel bad. Unfortunately, these machines have also started to go bad, so players have to attack them.
This War Of Mine
This War of Mine is a tough war survival game where players can’t play as soldiers but instead must learn to live as a group of civilians living in the ruins of a once-bustling town. Players have to make hard decisions and have to live with the results every day of their survival.
Some of these choices include killing other people if they want to take their resources, but most of the time, these people aren’t scavengers; they’re just civilians trying to survive in the same environment.
The Walking Dead
The Walking Dead, the game based on the hit TV show, is just like the other Telltale games in that it forces players to make hard decisions. When trying to stay alive in a Zombie apocalypse, players will run into people they may or may not be able to kill, depending on the situation.
If a player has played the game more than once and tried to make different choices each time, they may have killed people who could have lived or let people die. A player is more likely to think about these choices if they know they could have saved them.
Metal Gear Solid 3
While most of the game doesn’t make the player feel bad about what they do, there is one part that does. Players know that they will have to kill someone they don’t want to by the end of the game.
The buildup to killing The Boss at the end of Metal Gear Solid 3 is enough to make any player feel bad about killing the main character’s mentor. Even though they feel like the government has turned its back on them, Snake has to do what it says.
Spec Ops: The Line
Even third-person shooters like Spec Ops: The Line can leave players with lasting memories. Like in This War of Mine, the player has to make choices that don’t have easy answers. This can lead to killing people who don’t deserve it, making the player feel bad about what they did.
By the end of 8 Ball Pool game, the player is either numb to the choices they’ve made or filled with guilt. Many people will play the game again to try to figure out a better way to deal with the choices they had to make.
The Last Of Us Part 2
While the ending of The Last of Us may have made some players feel bad, especially since they had to kill a lot of innocent people to save Ellie from being used, it was still a good game. Part 2 of The Last of Us moves away from just focusing on the infected and looks at the problems between the different groups of survivors.
This makes many players think about not only what Joel did, but also what other survivors did, like Ellie, and how her actions affected people like Abbey and the groups they were with.
Dark Souls
In the Dark Souls series, the player faces a lot of scary monsters that many players don’t take two seconds to learn about because they just want to beat them and not learn about the story behind them. But Sif, a big gray fluffy wolf, was a boss that made players feel bad even if they didn’t know anything about its story.
Sif is a huge gray wolf who carries a sword in his mouth. Players must try not to get hit by him and take him down, but every cut to this giant wolf who is only trying to protect his owner’s grave breaks their hearts. No matter how hard they fight, many people are still unhappy.
Shadow Of The Colossus
Shadow of the Colossus is an action-adventure game like no other. The main character wants to bring an innocent girl back to life, so the player has to kill ancient guardians that are as big as buildings. Even though this goal is good, killing the big creatures called Colossus makes the player feel bad because they all seem to be at peace.
As they climb them, they barely try to get rid of the player because they are so small that it is hard for them to get rid of the main character. By the time the player gets to the best place to beat this colossus, it has for the most part already given up.