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Essays 05 October 2020, 01:24

Video Games With the Best Stories

Although most games treat storytelling very instrumentally, some developers take it more seriously, creating stories that are exciting, touching and stay with us forever. We decided to create a list of games that tell the most powerful stories.

Table of Contents

The Last of Us

INFORMATION

  1. Genre: action adventure game
  2. What's good beyond the plot: solid stealth mechanics

Naughty Dog is one of Sony's most important devteams, making great games for the Japanese giant's consoles from the very beginning of the PlayStation brand. Before The Last of Us, the studio was associated with anything but deep, ambitious storytelling. Crash Bandicoot and Jak were platformers that treated the script pretty much as necessary evil, and the Uncharted series, while offering an enjoyable story, aimed rather at relaxing summer adventure cinema vibes.

Much can be said about the script of The Last of Us, but certainly not that it is relaxing. This action adventure game with survival elements takes us to the future, an America ravaged by a fungus that turns Homo sapiens into mindless and extremely dangerous creatures. Civilization has fallen, but people are somehow coping – some under the yoke of a government trying hard to keep what is left of the world in its grip, others by being part of the Fireflies, a group resisting the authorities, and still others by simply living in the middle of nowhere, sometimes alone, sometimes in a group of feral bandits.

In a world like this, we play as Joel, an old courier who kills off the memory of his past tragedies and a better world with cynicism. The man is given the task of transporting a unique package – a spunky teenager who could be the key to saving the world. Like in McCarthy's The Road, the pair travel across devastated areas, meeting other survivors and learning about their dramas, fighting for survival and gradually learning to trust each other. All this leads to one of the most powerful, morally ambiguous finales that developers of high-budget video games dared to give us...

  1. More about The Last of Us

Michael Grygorcewicz

Michael Grygorcewicz

He first worked as a co-worker at GRYOnline.pl. In 2023 he became the head of the Paid Products department. He has been creating articles about games for over twenty years. He started with amateur websites, which he coded himself in HTML, then he moved on to increasingly larger portals. A computer engineer, but he was always more drawn to writing than programming, and he decided to tie his future with the former. In games, he primarily looks for stories, emotions, and immersion that no other medium can provide - hence, among his favorite titles, are games focusing on narration. Believes that NieR: Automata is the best game ever made.

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Red Dead Redemption 2

Red Dead Redemption 2

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

Life is Strange

Life is Strange

NieR: Automata

NieR: Automata

The Last of Us

The Last of Us

Mafia II

Mafia II

BioShock

BioShock

Deus Ex: Human Revolution

Deus Ex: Human Revolution

Mass Effect

Mass Effect

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic

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