The whole point of media is to experience stories and worlds you don’t see in the normal world. When I sit down on my couch in a house in the Midwest suburbs, I boot up games that whisk me away to medieval fantasies and sci-fi space expeditions.
But wild worlds require wild minds. If you approach games like real life, you’ll find yourself bored, hindered, and often punished. These games, in particular, give you a hard time trying to play them reasonably and realistically.
Some of these games have narrative implications that reinforce this idea. So just to be safe: Spoiler Warning.
To say that The Stanley Parable punishes you may be a bit inaccurate. There are never any wrong choices in the game, a point the developers make a point to reinforce. Traditionally, doing what the game tells you is the ‘normal’ thing to do.
But the entire point of The Stanley Parable is to NOT do what you’re told. By choosing when to listen or ignore the narrator, you carve through one ofthe countless pathwaysthe game offers. If you just do like you’re told, you miss out on most of the game.
Undertale is an indie RPG that subverts expectations in a dramatic way. If you’ve ever played a Final Fantasy or a Pokemon game, you get the idea: encounter monsters, fight them, get EXP.
In Undertale, you’re able to actually complete the entire game without hurting anyone. In fact, it’s such an influential aspect of the game that itcompletely changes how scenes, relationships, and mechanics work later on. If you play it like a ‘normal’ RPG, then you actually miss out on a much richer experience.
If you took one look at Cruelty Squad and then dismissed it forever, I wouldn’t blame you. That’s an extremely reasonable response that any normal person would make. And that’s exactly what this game punishes you for.
Cruelty Squad’s design is extremely intentional, with every color, shape, graphic, and gameplay mechanic designed to be the exact opposite of what it’s “supposed” to be. Falling into normal mindsets, expecting traditional trends, all of that works against you when playing. The only way to truly experience the majesty happening here is to forgo all of it and dive headfirst into the chaos.
Tomodachi Life, and the spin-off RPG Miitopia, are all about creating a plethora of Mii characters to populate the game, finding humor and entertainment with the absurdity of it all. No other game can have Macho Man Randy Savage and Freddy Fazbear in a rap battle.
This is going to sound a bit impolite. But odds are, you aren’t the most creative person. Creativity can come in countless forms, and thinking up numerous Mii characters isn’t a normal person’s strong suit. But these games rely on exactly that. To really make the most of them, you need to get weird, get wild, get specific.
This entry is the most directly comparable to real life. Who hasn’t made themselves in the Sims before, right? But you don’t want to play the game the way you live. In the Sims, your character invites people over to cookouts, buy pools, and spend three hours a day improving their skills.
You know what I did yesterday? I worked, ate some stew, then played video games until bed. The daily grind of the average person is, admittedly, boring. If you played the Sims like you lived a normal life, you would miss out on a majority of the silly experiences the game offers.
If anything, we should all strive to live our lives like a Sims game. Spend three hours practicing a craft, go out to random events, and break away from the repetition.
On the surface, Spec Ops: The Line is your standard military shooter experience. Shoot bad guys, be heroes, all that. But further into the story, you find out that you’re not as good as it seems. You become involved in war crimes involving chemical attacks on civilians. And the game really makes a point of berating you for it.
To be fair, you don’t exactly have a choice here. The dramatic twist of the game is scripted events from linear stories. So it’s not your fault for playing like it’s a normal shooter game. But even so, it’s a big narrative punishment for doing what you’re expected to do.
The Telltale Walking Dead games tell a heavy story about a young girl trying to survive in a zombie apocalypse. Along the way, you make several game-altering decisions, often determining whether certain characters live or die.
You have no way of really knowing how much of an impact your decisions will make. Oftentimes, your choices will have results antithetical to your desires. And a surprising number of times, the risky, unreasonable choice is the smarter one. Playing like a normal person will only get you killed.
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One of the most highly regarded RPGs of our time, The Witcher 3 often presents you with difficult choices and moral decisions. So, like any reasonable person, you pick the answer that seems thought out and morally positive. And that is a mistake.
Many of these choices will actually result in a worse outcome if you choose the reasonable answer. If a questline does have a good outcome, it usually only can be achieved by choosing the morally corrupt or seemingly antagonistic option. Of all the games on this list, this one actively punishes you the most.
