10 Brutal Video Game Scenes You Didn't Want To Control

4. Enabling Horrible Things To Save Yourself - Papers, Please

Papers, Please is an interesting one here because it doesn’t accost you with violent visuals and there’s no gore to speak of, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t set up some brutal scenarios it forces you to play through. In essence, you play as a immigration officer at the border of a fictional dystopian country.

It’s your job to ensure everyone’s papers are in order and doing well is essential to ensuring you get paid so you can bring that money home to spend supporting your family.

That’s all well and good but things get complicated quickly. Even if you do everything right, or try to, there’s some difficult moral choices to make. Do you help a man get essential medical care in your country even if it costs you money to feed your family? What about a woman who is being trafficked or a happy couple where only one of them has their papers in order? Some of these choices are so painful I personally had to put the game down. You can do the right moral thing all day long but you can’t afford to come home to your family with docked pay due to your actions. Making mistakes can also lead to headlines in the newspaper the next day showing you the sometimes fatal consequences of your actions.

It’s terribly brutal as a gameplay mechanic and requires you to really emotionally detach from it to get through it.