10 Brutally Hard Decisions Video Games Forced You To Make

1. Executing An Innocent Man To Save Your Son - Heavy Rain

The world needs more creatives like David Cage - providing they have producers to reign them in here and there. Whereas Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy and Beyond: Two Souls were far too ludicrous for their own good (you actually fought the internet at one point in the former), Heavy Rain sits nicely in the middle as a murder-mystery spread out across four different protagonists, all contributing to an eventual endgame.

One such character is Ethan Mars, the badly voice-acted but ultimately likable father of Jason ("JAY-SON!") and Sean, the latter of which he gets set on a handful of violent 'trials' by the devious Origami Killer to prove his love for. About midway through the game you'll be asked to kill a man, just seemingly for the sake of it. Heavy Rain always let you resign Ethan's fate to that of the justice department if you so decided, and that was part of the appeal - it was literally asking you, "How far would you go to save your son?" in every respect.

You find out through the course of talking to the guy that he's a drug dealer, but that he also has two children, with the game's visualisation of thought patterns weighing up the 'pros' and 'cons' of the situation in Mars' head in real-time. If you go through with the decision, Ethan will throw up and find out the next piece of the puzzle was in the gun barrel all along, and if you leave, you've failed the killer's demands, reconciling son Sean to an early grave unless you can somehow find his location through other means.

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What other insanely harsh video game choices have you come across? Let us know in the comments!