Developers should try to make gamers uncomfortable

Aug 11, 2012 18:11 GMT  ·  By

Since I was a kid I was an avid reader of the science fiction space opera genre and in more recent times this love has evolved to cover harder sci-fi and fantasy, with my most recent crush coming in the form of the novel series A Song of Ice and Fire, from R.R. Martin.

After the end of the second season of the HBO made series, I jumped right into Game of Thrones, the action role-playing game from developer Cyanide and publisher Focus Home Interactive, and while the game has plenty of issues, I recently replayed the ending and once again came away impressed by how it handles it.

From here down I will spoil the end of the game.

Before the final climactic battle of Game of Thrones the player needs to choose which destiny he will enact, that of Alester or that of Mors, and the final battle is one between the two heroes that ends in the death of one of them.

This is courageous enough but the developers manage to go even further.

After the battle is won, each of the characters gets presented with two choices, linked to a bastard child and his own destiny.

I finished the game four times in order to see all of them and I can report that none of them is actually happy in any way.

Two of them involve principles and the death of the main characters while the other two mean that some core concept is betrayed by either Mors or Alester and suggest that they live the rest of their existence feeling hollow and spend.

The tone of the game meshes perfectly with that of the R.R. Martin books and the HBO television series and it elevates a medium quality game into the top five of the year for me.