10 Video Games That Punish You For Making The Ethical Choice

5. This War Of Mine

There’s a Papers Please sort of game genre that seems to want to make you sad, and This War of Mine absolutely belongs in the same bucket.

This War of Mine is a strategy survival game where you’ll have to make difficult choices for a group of civilians hiding out in a fictional city under siege. You’ll need to maintain the group’s health, hunger, and mood and deal with encounters with other NPC survivors. This is where things get tricky. Well, trickier. Outsiders will ask for food and medicine and it’s up to you to help them if you want, or you can rob or kill them. Of course, the ethical thing would be to help your fellow man but giving away your extremely scarce supplies is going to make things incredibly difficult for you in game and for the survivability of your group.

If for some reason this doesn’t sound like a painful ethical nightmare already, you can always grab The Little Ones DLC.

This expansion adds a child survivor who can’t help the shelter initially or defend themselves but needs constant attention, is prone to depression, and needs to be taught to help out with various chores over time. It’s a losing battle trying to keep everyone safe and happy the entire time, but making the ethical choices in this instance will often make things far more dire.