10 EXACT Moments Video Games Gave Us The ICK
9. Dooming Lady Boyle To Slavery - Dishonored
In the Dishonored mission "Lady Boyle's Last Party," players are tasked with assassinating Lady Boyle, who is one of the strongest supporters of one of the game's primary villains, the Lord Regent.
You're able to simply murder Lady Boyle, or if you'd prefer the non-lethal route there is another option which, ironically, is considerably more horrifying than mere death.
The non-lethal approach sees you knocking Lady Boyle unconscious and delivering her to Lord Brisby, a creepy stalker obsessed with her.
Bring Boyle's body to Brisby and he'll load her up into his boat and ride off, but not before speaking a few skin-crawling one-liners, like "Someday she'll learn to appreciate me. After all, she'll have her whole life."
With lines like that there's very little ambiguity to the situation - rather than simply kill Boyle and be done with it, you're condemning her to a lifetime of probable sexual slavery, which is surely infinitely worse.
Lady Boyle was far from a good person, but this "non-lethal" approach felt needlessly cruel and didn't quite deliver the satisfying "gotcha!" developers Arkane clearly intended.
A few years later, one of the game's co-writers and co-directors, Harvey Smith, even admitted that they were "wrongheaded" about Lady Boyle's fate, while pointing out that he felt she likely managed to outsmart Brisby in the end.
All the same, the way it's presented in the game is... horrifying.