The Best Story-Driven Games of All Time

Everything you learn is the only thing that survives the reset, and the reset arrives every twenty-two minutes whether you are ready or not. Mobius Digital built it and Annapurna Interactive published it on 28 May 2019, a year before it reached Steam on 18 June 2020. Your ship log fills with Nomai translations found by flying somewhere stupid, and the ending is gated on knowledge alone. I wanted my memory wiped afterwards.

Waking on a mortuary slab, you find out death is not a fail state: dying is how the Nameless One gets his memories back, so the punishment doubles as the research method. Black Isle Studios shipped roughly eight hundred thousand words of it in 1999, published by Interplay, and the Steam page is Beamdog's 2017 Enhanced Edition rather than a bare original build. Combat is genuinely bad.

Wikipedia gets the link because Sony kept the 2013 original a PlayStation 3 exclusive and only the Part I remake, which the remakes list owns, ever reached PC. Naughty Dog developed it; Sony Computer Entertainment published it on 14 June 2013. The winter chapter takes Joel away, hands you Ellie and a bow, and stops being about protecting anyone. Joel's last lie still starts arguments in pubs.

Rapture argues with itself through audio diaries you have to choose to stand still for, which is already an odd way to tell a story. Then Andrew Ryan hands you a golf club, says would you kindly, and every hour you have played turns into evidence. 2K Boston and 2K Australia released it on 21 August 2007; the link is that original, not the Remastered edition the remakes list took.

Ravenholm exists because somebody at Valve decided the gravity gun deserved a chapter of its own, and pinning a headcrab to a wall with a sawblade says more about Father Grigori than a monologue would. Valve shipped it on 16 November 2004 and never took the camera off you: no cutscenes, no third-person interludes, the plot happening while you hold the crowbar.

Ending E turns the credits into a bullet-hell staircase built out of the developers' own names, and when you finally clear it the game asks whether you will delete your save file so a stranger can get through theirs. Square Enix and PlatinumGames released it on 17 March 2017. Saying yes cost me forty hours of progress and I would say yes again.

Memento Mortem is a pocket watch that freezes the instant of each death into a diorama you can walk around, and you identify the crew by boots, accents and who is standing beside whom. Lucas Pope made it alone, self-published as 3909, and released it on 18 October 2018 in a one-bit dither that makes your eyes do work. Guessing is punished; deducing feels illegal.

Halfway through, the Gold Saucer stages a date whose partner is picked by dialogue answers you gave hours earlier, with nothing on screen saying they were being scored. Then Aerith. Square developed and published it for the PlayStation in January 1997; the Steam entry carries a 2013 date because what is sold there is the PC version, not Remake or Rebirth.

Few twists in games are load-bearing on your own save file, and this one is. An alignment system spends the whole campaign quietly recording what sort of person you decided to be, then the Leviathan reveal hands that record straight back to you with a different name attached. BioWare shipped it for Xbox on 16 July 2003, published by LucasArts. Taris is still far too long.

Sixteen colossi, no other enemies, no towns, barely any dialogue. A grip meter turns each climb into a negotiation with an animal that has done nothing to you, and every kill makes the world quieter and worse, which is the whole plot. Team Ico's 2005 PlayStation 2 original gets a Wikipedia link because neither it nor the 2018 remake is on Steam; both are Sony console exclusives.

Two people talking on a handheld radio, and almost nothing else happens. Campo Santo's first game, published with Panic on 9 February 2016, puts you in a Wyoming lookout tower with Delilah as a voice you can lie to, and a dialogue timer that turns saying nothing into an answer. I picked the cruel reply once out of curiosity and felt bad about it for a week.

One continuous shot, start to finish: no camera cuts, no loading screens, no fades between cutscene and control. Because the camera never blinks, Atreus stays in frame being disappointed in you, and Kratos teaching him to hunt badly does more character work than any speech in the series. Santa Monica Studio's 2018 PlayStation 4 original reached Steam on 14 January 2022 through Jetpack Interactive.

Dialogue is lettered in scripts that match the speaker, so a printer gets movable type and a farmhand a shaky hand, and errors are scratched out and rewritten in real time as people correct themselves mid-sentence. Obsidian Entertainment set its murder mystery in sixteenth-century Bavaria, and Xbox Game Studios published it on 15 November 2022. You accuse somebody on incomplete evidence, then keep living there.

Cardboard Computer put out Act I in January 2013 and the fifth and final act on 28 January 2020, which is why it appears here once instead of five times; Steam sells the whole thing as the PC Edition. Choices mostly change what a character remembers rather than what occurs, and a bar scene hands you a song and lets you choose its lyrics. Magical realism about debt.

Visual novels are eligible here, and this is the argument for that call: the Voice of the Hero narrates your intentions back at you, argues with them, and each loop rewrites what waits in the basement according to what you did in the last one. Black Tabby Games developed and published it on 23 October 2023, and a free Pristine Cut update in October 2024 added the chapters the store page now advertises.