Story games
9 Best Story Games That Stay With You
Our picks for the best story games, from Red Dead Redemption 2 to Disco Elysium and Firewatch, with nothing spoiled past the opening premise.
Some games you remember for the controls. These you remember for the people in them. If you read every note lying around, sit through the credits and still think about a conversation from a game you finished years ago, this is our list of the best story games to play next. A few will take you months. Firewatch takes an afternoon.
A clever twist wasn't enough to get on here; the writing had to hold up scene by scene. So two huge open worlds sit next to a detective game that is mostly reading, a drama built on rewinding time, and a couple of small independent games that do a lot with very little. We describe each one only as far as its opening premise, so you can go in fresh.
My 9 Games
9 Best Story Games That Stay With You
The nine picks
Red Dead Redemption 2
Rockstar Games · 2018
It's 1899, and Arthur Morgan rides with the Van der Linde gang while the law closes in and the outlaw era runs out. Rockstar lets it move slowly. You do camp chores, take long rides and overhear small talk, and over dozens of hours the gang starts to feel like a family coming apart in front of you. If you're impatient, this will test you. We think the payoff is worth it.
- Best for
- People who want a western the length of a novel
- When to play
- Evenings across a long winter
The Last of Us Part I
Naughty Dog · 2022
A ground-up remake of the 2013 game. Joel, a smuggler who stopped caring about most things a long time ago, agrees to get a teenage girl named Ellie across what's left of the United States. The fights are tense and sometimes grim. What people talk about afterward, though, is the quiet stuff between the two of them, and the performances that sell it.
- Best for
- Anyone ready for a heavy story
- When to play
- A free weekend with nothing planned after it
Disco Elysium
ZA/UM · 2019
You wake up in a wrecked hotel room. You're a detective, apparently, though you can't remember your own name, and there's a murder to solve in the city of Revachol. There's no conventional combat. Your skills talk to you instead, as voices in your head that argue with each other and sometimes give terrible advice. It's the funniest game on this list and, somehow, one of the saddest.
- Best for
- Readers who don't mind a lot of text
- When to play
- Quiet nights with time to read
Mass Effect: Legendary Edition
BioWare · 2021
Three games, remastered together, following Commander Shepard and a crew you recruit from across the galaxy. The hook is that your decisions carry over, so a choice from the first game can come back in the third. Ask fans what they remember and they rarely name a mission. They name a squadmate, or a late conversation on the ship.
- Best for
- Sci-fi fans who want their choices to stick
- When to play
- A space opera habit that lasts months
NieR:Automata
PlatinumGames · 2017
2B and 9S are androids sent to fight machines on an Earth that humans abandoned. On the surface it's a fast, stylish action game. Underneath, it keeps asking what the point of any of this is, for the androids and the machines alike. Don't stop at the first ending. The story is built to be played through more than once, and it changes shape when you do.
- Best for
- Players who like philosophy with their action
- When to play
- Late at night, soundtrack turned up
Life is Strange
Dontnod Entertainment · 2015
Max Caulfield, a photography student back in her hometown of Arcadia Bay, Oregon, finds out she can rewind time. That means you can take back what you just said to someone. You'd think that would make choices matter less. In practice they feel heavier, because you know exactly what you're giving up. It comes in five episodes, each ending at a natural place to stop.
- Best for
- Fans of coming-of-age stories
- When to play
- An episode a night for a week
Firewatch
Campo Santo · 2016
Summer, 1989. Henry takes a job as a fire lookout in the Wyoming wilderness, and the only person he talks to is his supervisor, Delilah, over a handheld radio. You pick what he says. That's most of the game, and the dialogue is so natural it can feel like eavesdropping. You'll finish in about four hours.
- Best for
- Anyone who loves good dialogue
- When to play
- One summer evening
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
CD Projekt Red · 2015
Geralt of Rivia, a monster hunter for hire, is searching a war-torn country for Ciri, the young woman he helped raise. The main story is good. The side quests are why people still recommend it a decade later: a village job about some monster problem can turn out as layered as anything in the main plot. Don't rush it.
- Best for
- Fantasy readers who want a big world to get lost in
- When to play
- A long holiday break
Kentucky Route Zero
Cardboard Computer · 2020
Conway, a delivery driver on one last job for an antique shop, goes looking for an address that doesn't seem to exist and ends up on a secret highway running beneath Kentucky. It came out in five acts between 2013 and 2020. Almost everything happens through what people say to each other. It's slow and dreamlike, and we can't think of anything else like it.
- Best for
- Fans of literary, offbeat fiction
- When to play
- A rainy night with the lights low
Make it yours
Nobody would pick the same nine, and that's what makes it fun. Load these into My 9, drop the ones that didn't land for you, put in the stories you still think about, and share the grid. Then ask your friends which characters they can't shake.
Opens the maker with these nine in the grid. Swap any of them for your own.