Summary
As the oldest and most reputable platform for gaming, the PC has developed a long and storied history of delivering some of the very best games ever made. When it comes to narratives, the PC platform is a proven breeding ground for some of the best.
Whether it be fourth-wall-breaking meta-masterpieces or philosophical inquiries into the nature of being through the lens of a CRPG, these are some of the best stories in PC gaming.
As a note, these games were all exclusive to PC on release, but some have now been ported to consoles.
Beginning as a cult classic game after its release in 2005 and slowly becoming one of the beloved indie darlings of the entire gaming world,Pathologicis a game that almost defies description due to its sheer strangeness, but it is beloved precisely due to its weirdness.
Gamers inhabit the role of three interconnecting characters as a plague takes over a small strange town deep in the Russian countryside. To fix the plague, players must survive brutal difficulty, zombies, and monsters that break the very fabric of reality. It’s a wild experience, but one well worth playing,as well as its sequel/remake which crafts an equally brilliant atmosphere.
While most might put something likeThe Stanley Parableas the best fourth-wall-breaking meta-narrative game,The Beginner’s Guidehas always stood as a more emotionally poignant and creatively focused narrative, even if it is largely underappreciated by gamers at large.
Players play… themselves, as they explore the unfinished levels of a talented game designer and the developer notes left behind by their friends. As is expected, things start to get very meta, very quickly, resulting in one of the most memorable PC narratives imaginable.
Gamers have a wide variety of opinions onWorld of Warcraft, which is appropriate for a game that has been running for almost twenty years. Regardless, it’s hard to deny just how totemic the game’s narrative is, and just how influential it has been ever since release.
Attempting to sum up the story ofWorld of Warcraftin a tidy sentence is essentially impossible, but needless to say, players take control of a hero as they navigate through the dangerous world of Azeroth, conquering world-ending threats and tracking literally decades-long storylines. It’s a lot of work, but it pays off with one of the grandest fantasy epics of them all.
There is perhaps no more influential game on first-person shooters thanHalf-Life 2, released all the way back in 2004 but still holding up remarkably well in the present day, with a near-identical engine being used for popular platforms likeGarry’s Mod.
Half-Life 2continues the story of Gordon Freeman, now in a dystopian future where the alien Combine has taken over the world. Gordon must fight back against this threat with a trusty crowbar in hand as Valve’s sci-fi epic twists and turns towards one of gaming’s most infamous but effective cliffhangers ever put to pixel, andthat’s not even counting the game’s crazy cut content.
Immersive Sim games are well known for their engaging narratives because they implicitly encourage players to read as much incidental text as possible and thoroughly explore a world to let the environment do a lot of the narrative heavy lifting.System Shock 2is the prototype for all immersive sims to follow.
InSystem Shock 2,gamers play as a soldier awoken from cryogenic sleep aboard the Von Braun in the year 2114 which has been overtaken by the malevolent AI known as SHODAN. The game is an incredible mix of sci-fi, cyberpunk, and horror, and is well worth playing for any fans of the immersive sim genre.Following a critically acclaimed remake of the original, there may even be a remake ofSystem Shock 2on the way as well.
Asone of the relatively few games based on horror books,I Have No Mouth, And I Must Screamis based on the short story of the same name by Harlan Ellison about a planet-sized computer called AM torturing the final five humans left alive.
The video game adaptation doesn’t just adapt the book, but tangibly expands on it with the contributions of Ellison himself, resulting in a story that might actually be an improvement on the original, diving deep into the backstories of each of the five humans and crafting a interwoven narrative that is still as gut-wrenching as the original, but with even more depth.
Many modern gamers have discovered the joys of the CRPG throughBaldur’s Gate 3, but veterans of the genre frequently point to 1999’sPlanescape: Tormentas the very best of the genre, taking the world ofD&Dand going further than any game had gone before.
Gamers play as the Nameless One, an amnesiac exploring the planes of theD&Dcosmologyalongside an eclectic crew of companionsas they struggle to reclaim their memory and figure out who they were before. What results is a narrative with incredible depth, functioning one part as a philosophical thought experiment, and one part as the closest games have ever gotten to the depth of literature’s greatest novels. It’s incredible, and well worth playing for gamers looking for a meaty story to dig into.
As if it could be anything else. WhileSystem Shock 2precedesDeus Exand is considered one of the first classics of the immersive sim,Deus Exis widely considered to be the pinnacle of the immersive sim genre that is yet to be beaten.
Gamers take control of JC Denton, an agent for a future organization in 2052 dedicated to hunting down terrorists in the midst of a deadly pandemic known as the Gray Death. The game is a masterful depiction of conspiracy thriller storytelling, weaving a story of such depth and complexity that it takes more than a few playthroughs to fully grasp the totality of it. It’s easily one of the best conspiracy thrillers ever written, andit’s still the very best game in the entireDeus Exfranchise.
