10 Video Game Decisions You Immediately Regret Making

Choice is wonderful, but is too much of it a bad thing?

Ask anyone under the thumb of Soviet oppression and they'd have said, "nyet, absolutely not," or at least they would have had they not feared being whisked away in the middle of the night for expressing such an opinion. When Tetris creator Alexey Pajitnov, himself a citizen of the Eastern bloc, visited a Tokyo supermarket for the first time, he broke down in tears; he couldn't believe real people could choose between more than two different fruits, and that they didn't have to wait in line to buy a potato.

Clearly then, he believed choice was a good thing. Yet he never introduced it to his games; the only way in Tetris is down, and you get whatever block you're given, even if you really want and need one of the big long boys.

So was Pajitnov a hypocrite? Not hardly: he recognised, even before video games generally allowed players to make complex decisions, that choice is often a burden, not a blessing. In many games which have presented ethical dilemmas since, the only good option has been to hit the power switch, and take up a less stressful hobby like base jumping instead.

What would you be prepared to do to save the ones you love? Pay a hefty ransom, upwards of five figures? Kill a fella or two? Trade your Charizard Pokémon card? Something unimaginably even more extreme than that?

That's the core question driving the narrative of David Cage's 2010 "Jason!"-em-up Heavy Rain. Having rather carelessly lost another of his kids, hapless father Ethan Mars is goaded by a series of increasingly hideous challenges, each offering another part of the cipher supposedly revealing his son's location should he successfully pass them.

It starts off relatively simple; the first trial asks him to drive against traffic for five miles. Things quickly ramp up - he's next asked to traverse a vicious obstacle course of broken glass and live electricity - before it all takes a stomach-churning turn with the third and most brutal task.

Decoding another origami clue, this time in the shape of a lizard, Ethan finds himself in a room with a small table laden with all manner of very sharp objects. A recording soon confirms our worst suspicions: he must cut off part of his finger within five minutes.

No matter how you look at it, there's no easy way to saw/hack/chop off a digit. It's an utterly butt-clenching sequence with no easy option. Surely your son is worth more than your trigger finger? And besides, at least Ethan wasn't asked to chop something else off.