Disco Elysium
It’s a dialogue-heavy “non-traditional” isometric RPG with essentially zero combat. You’re a detective on a murder case. I won’t say anything else besides it’s pretty much ALL about the story.
Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne is perhaps the only game I ever replayed entirely because of its story.
“Story” and “plot” are two different things. Like, in the oft-mentioned Portal, the plot is “insane computer is putting you through torturous tests for the Hell of it, and you need to escape and destroy the computer”. Which is a really weak plot even by video game standards. But the characterization and acting of the computer was so strong that, despite that weak plot, the story can be considered good.
To bring back the debate on Final Fantasy, I’m also not a big fan of FF VII. IMHO FF IV has a classic story that is told well, and it’s still my favorite Final Fantasy to this day. A close second is FF X and it’s sequel X-2. The twist at the end where it turns out that Tidus, rather than Yuna, as the main character in mortal danger is one of my favorite twists.
ETA. And of course the original Suikoden is also one of my favorites:)
Bioshock did what it did because it was (intentionally) riding the coattails of System Shock 2–which had an amazingly atmospheric world and a lot of background stories that got told well, with a nice little twist if you played the first System Shock as well.
The game that sticks in my mind as compelling storytelling was “The Signal from Tolva”. The main game itself has relatively little plot as such, and just turns you loose in an open world to do as you see fit (so long as what you see fit to do is blast on robots). For a game with relatively few words, there’s a lot of implied plot going on. I described it elsewhere as “storytelling by absence”.
Paraphrasing Desi Arnez in “The Long, Long, Trailer”:
Zombie. You want to sound like an old-timer, you call it a zombie.
I will also nominate To the Moon, which is a pure story game with no gameplay in it. It’s sequel is also excellent, called Finding Paradise.
I don’t play a lot of video games, but of the ones I’ve played:
Dragon Age: Origins. I got really invested in the story, and when I “misplayed” some interaction or another and one of the NPCs in the party broke off the romantic relationship that I was pursuing between them and the MC, I was genuinely saddened.
I thought DA II was…ok, but I never really cared that much about the characters. I was never able to really get into DA: Inquisition. I think between a partially amnesiac MC and the sandboxy gameplay, I just never got invested in any of the characters or their stories.
Mass Effect 2 and 3. By the same studio as Dragon Age. I’m not as interested in sci-fi as in fantasy, in general, but those games really hit it out of the park (at least until the very end of ME3…). I really cared about most of the characters, and choosing between different paths often really felt like hard choices. (I never played the original, until years later I tried a port, and #@%& that stupid tank! No storyline was worth trying to maneuver that piece of $#!*).
The Force Unleashed. It’s almost more of an interactive movie than a video game. It’s also, seriously, one of my favorite Star Wars movies. The “sequel”, from a different studio, was a mindless, platformer, and I hate platformers.
I second this.
Also, BioShock.
I’ve just got the Bioshock collection for the Switch and I’m enjoying it very much. The story building is pretty much unobtrusive but immersive nonetheless, much better than Wolfenstein:
New Colossus (which relied on heavy-handed, badly acted cutscenes).
Wolfenstein is meant to be over the top, cheesy acting. The main character a man of few words and lots of quips. Think Terminator.
I don’t think the two games are very comparable beyond obvious FPS elements. Bioshock went waaay deeper into its story. The whole thing oozes story…that’s why you want to continue.
Wolfenstein, you want to kill Nazis and see what crazy shit is around the next corner. That said Wolfenstein did put enough story in to elevate it above the likes of DOOM which is pure mayhem with the barest of reasons for it tacked on (which is ok too…it has its place).
Nice discussion - it can be hard to say when a game is being driven by a great story, or vice versa, or a mix of the two.
Witcher 3 would be an uncontroversial pick for a game with great story-telling and I reckon is driven by it - replaced with some generic RPG narrative and you’d still be playing a very good open world game, but it wouldn’t be anywhere the level or status that game enjoys (DLC on this game is heavyweight, as well).
I thought the story and plot of Zelda Breath of the Wild was awesome when I was playing it, but stepping back that is surely only because the game engine is so magnificent. Fair to say the story is extremely childish, with horrible voice-acting, but manages to work in the context of a truly great game.
But it tried and failed to be much more that. It took itself far, far too seriously and made it really obvious that it was trying far too hard to be something other than “shoot nazis in the face” (which is what I loved about the orginals), unskippable cut-scenes can kiss my balls.
Bioshock is managing to allow you to discover the story organically, Wolfenstein tries to force-feed it to you whether you want it or not. I liked the shooting, hated the story. It added nothing.
I have a soft spot for the old Space Quest games.
Space Quest V and Space Quest VI had especially good (and funny) storylines. The whole series seems to be abandonware now and readily available.
I played so many games with a good storyline, that I don’t even know what to choose…hmm I’m just gonna say Transistor, because I love the atmosphere and the story
I don’t knoow maybe Devil May Cry also?
Uncharted, from the first game to the last is a great story (if you are into historical treasure hunting).
The first (new) Wolfenstein did a good job with an over the top story that was entertaining and obviously just an excuse to shoot Nazis. It was largely stupid fun.
The second (new) Wolfenstein game tried to add in a bunch of stuff about racism and drama, etc. Some people bitched about “social justice” aspects, etc but I didn’t care about that – it just wasn’t especially well done and the cut scenes were often pretty long and took away from my Nazi killing. I don’t need to know about BJ Blazkowicz’s troubled childhood, especially if it’s going to come in heavy-handed lessons and take a while to get through.
I forgot about Space Quest! The 2 sequels which made you a spaceship captain (III and V) were my favorites. The graphics are a little grainy but V holds up and is still better than most adventure games created today.
This is the same Wolfenstein universe as Wolfenstein: Youngblood? Then I’m going to lean on “intentionally cheesy” so hard it’s in danger of breaking off.
Important caveat: I loved Younglood, it was great fun to play through with my wife. You both play as Blazkoweicz’s (SP) twin daughters, using crypto-Jewish powered armour and murdering dieselpunk Nazis with their own oversized dieselpunk guns, while quipping at each other with quotes from the in-game equivalent of the Hardy Boys novel. If the game were any more light-hearted (with a few basic exceptions) it was in danger of floating away entirely.
I’m deviating just a little and going to throw in a “much more plot than expected” response for Conan Exiles.
In what could have just been Yet Another Build-and-Survive game, the Conan Exiles world is curated and has a number of historical plot subthreads, revealed to the player as telegraphic steles and the occasional ghost reliving moments of their past. Some precious few characters are also more interested in talking to you than killing you.
I don’t know if it still holds up, but I remember enjoying and laughing a lot at Under a Killing Moon when I was a young adult.