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Voices and Choices

While some video games revel in the density and effort required to discover the narrative in their virtual worlds, others want to make it as easy and accessible to make their story your own.

Two things come together in these games. Characters are fully voiced by actors. Choices have a tangible effect on how things turn out. For former reduces friction for the player. The latter increases engagement.

Games like the Frog's Princess, King of Dragon Pass and Call of the Sea offer a story-book feel with branching narrative that can be a novel way for younger players to discover the joy of stories.

Other games like South of the Circle, Before Your Eyes, Firewatch and It Takes Two offer fully voiced experiences with choices that don't create new endings but still add a sense of involvement.

Then there are games for older players like Detroit: Become Human, Last Stop, Grand Theft Auto, Twelve Minutes and Heavy Rain combine branching stories and fully voiced characters. These games use the immersion of the human voice and branching stories to create engaging experiences.

Voices and choices are a large part of what it means to be human. The games in this list use these two things to create experiences that engage on a deeper level.

This list includes 51 games from the last 26 years, with 980 likes. They come from a range of different genres and play-styles and are all good games if you want to hear characters make choices.

List Details

PEGI Ratings: PEGI 3 to PEGI 18
ESRB Ratings: ESRB EVERYONE to ESRB MATURE 17+
Australian Ratings: G to R 18+
Genres: Action, Adventure, Battle, Brain Game, Collecting, Communication, Fighting, Narrative, Platform, Point-and-Click, Puzzle, Rhythm, Role-Play, Sequencing, Shooting, Simulation, Sports, Stealth, Strategy and Traversal
Total Likes: 980

Related Lists

We have other Digital Stories lists of games:

Before Your Eyes

Release Date: 08/04/2021, updated in 2022

Platforms: Android, PC and iOS

Skill Rating: 8+ year-olds

Components: 3D First-Person and Cartoon

Before Your Eyes is a narrative game about an 11-year-old boy revisiting his life before "crossing over" to the other side. You play by exploring scenes that represent snapshots of his life. Unusually, you make choices and interact with the game by...

Firewatch

Release Date: 20/09/2016

Platforms: Mac, PC, PS4, Switch and Xbox One

Skill Rating: 11+ year-olds

Components: 3D First-Person, Cartoon and Open World

Firewatch is an explorative adventure where you play a fire lookout in America’s Shoshone National Forest. It has a relational and conspiracy undertone similar to the podcast/radio drama and Netflix show [link to...

It Takes Two

Release Date: 26/03/2021, updated in 2022

Platforms: PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S

Skill Rating: 8+ year-olds

Components: 3D Third-Person and Cartoon

It Takes Two is a running, jumping and exploring game that tells a story of a young girl, Rose, whose parents are divorcing. The girl creates two dolls to represent her parents, which unexpectedly trap the clashing-couple in them. You and a friend...

Road 96

Release Date: 16/08/2021

Platforms: PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S

Components: 3D Third-Person and Cartoon

Road 96 is a narrative adventure where you play a teenager trying to escape an oppressive, authoritarian country by reaching the border. Through a series of vignettes, you experience the most important and poignant parts on an epic road trip through a...

Everybody's Gone to the Rapture

Release Date: 12/08/2015, updated in 2016

Platforms: Mac, PC and PS4

Components: 3D First-Person and Open World

Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture lands you in a fictional deserted English village in 1984. As you walk the streets of another era you discover bright human forms who re-enact events like a radio play. Through their eyes, you see a web of fear,...

Grand Theft Auto V

Grand Theft Auto V (Series)

Release Date: 01/01/1997, updated in 2019

Platforms: Android, DS, PS2, PS3, PS4, PSP, Xbox, Xbox 360, Xbox One and iOS

Skill Rating: 15+ year-olds

Components: 3D Third-Person, Day and Night, Open World and Weather

Grand Theft Auto is a series of action-adventure game where you travel around one large location taking part in different criminal activities: pulling off heists, with lots of shooting and stealing and driving a variety of cars and other vehicles.

Oxenfree

Release Date: 14/01/2016, updated in 2016

Platforms: Android, Mac, PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One and iOS

Skill Rating: 11+ year-olds

Components: 3D Third-Person

Oxenfree is an adventure game where a teenagers’ beach party spirals into a supernatural story. You guide the outcome with your choices as the well-written dialogue reveals characters coming to terms with family breakdown, death of a sibling, blame...

Tacoma

Release Date: 24/04/2018

Platforms: Mac, PC, PS4 and Xbox One

Components: 3D First-Person

Tacoma is set aboard a space station in the year 2088. As you explore you can discover how the station’s crew lived and worked, using an AR device that lets you review past actions and conversations, you discover clues that unravel a plot of trust,...

Bioshock Infinite

Release Date: 26/03/2013, updated in 2020

Platforms: Mac, PC, PS3, PS4, Switch, Xbox 360 and Xbox One

Skill Rating: 16+ year-olds

Components: 3D First-Person

Bioshock Infinite is an adventure shooting game. Although the story is unconnected to the previous games in the series, it raises similar themes of dictatorship communities and alternative to capitalistic society. It's another nuanced and complex story...

Call of the Sea

Release Date: 12/08/2020, updated in 2020

Platforms: PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S

Skill Rating: 9+ year-olds

Components: 3D Third-Person

Call of the Sea is a narrative adventure set in the 1930s. As Nora, you explore an island in the Southern Pacific to find your missing husband. As you do you discover that he went hunting for a cure for your mystery illness, but what happened after that...

Detroit: Become Human

Release Date: 25/05/2018

Platforms: PS4

Skill Rating: 12+ year-olds

Components: 3D Third-Person

This is a branching narrative game from Quantic Dream, the studio behind Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls. This is the third game in the series and offers a more refined version of the filmic branching experience.

Heavy Rain

Release Date: 06/10/2010, updated in 2019

Platforms: PC, PS3 and PS4

Skill Rating: 12+ year-olds

Components: 3D Third-Person and Weather

Heavy Rain is from the same Quantic Dream studio who made Beyond: Two Souls and Detroit: Become Human. It preceded these games but shared the same branching narrative and photo-realistic aspirations.

Beyond Blue

Release Date: 22/04/2020, updated in 2020

Platforms: Apple TV, Mac, PC, PS4, Xbox One and iOS

Skill Rating: 6+ year-olds

Components: 3D Third-Person and Open World

Beyond Blue is an underwater exploration game where you play Mirai, a deep-sea explorer and scientist. You see, hear, and interact with the ocean and the creatures in it as you discover an untouched world.

Bioshock

Release Date: 21/08/2007, updated in 2016

Platforms: Mac, PC, PS3, PS4, Switch, Xbox 360 and Xbox One

Components: 3D First-Person

Bioshock is a first-person shooting game set in a fantastical underwater city. A dark story unfolds about the misuse of surgery and gene therapy, and what happens when a society develops with a power mad genius in control. It's an unusual combination of...

Twelve Minutes

Release Date: 19/08/2021, updated in 2021

Platforms: PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S

Components: 2D Overhead

12 Minutes is an adventure thriller game about a single apartment building. You view things from above and can interact with a simple click and drag interface. What starts as a romantic evening with your wife turns into a nightmare when a police...

Last Stop

Release Date: 22/07/2021

Platforms: PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S

Components: 3D First-Person and Cartoon

Last Stop is an adventure set in London. You play three interconnected characters, making choices that shape their conversations, and determine where their stories lead.

The Forgotten City

Release Date: 28/07/2021

Platforms: PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S

Skill Rating: 13+ year-olds

Components: 3D First-Person and Open World

The Forgotten City is a mystery adventure. You explore and relive the final days of a cursed Roman city, where if one person sins, everyone dies. It starts as a bewildering array of characters, locations and information but over multiple goes your...

Wylde Flowers

Release Date: 18/02/2022

Platforms: Apple TV, Mac, PC, Switch and iOS

Skill Rating: 7+ year-olds

Components: 2D Overhead, Day and Night, Grid and Weather

Wylde Flowers is a cozy life and farming strategy game with a witchy twist. It's a charming world of diverse characters, magical spells and player choices. You play Tara, who has moved in to help her grandma and the family farm. By day you work the farm...

Hidden Agenda

Release Date: 24/10/2017

Platforms: PS4

Skill Rating: 16+ year-olds

Components: 2D Side-On

Hidden Agenda is an adventure noir crime thriller. It's from the people who made Until Dawn, but uses the PlayLink technology to let multiple people play on the PlayStation using their smartphones to interact and make decisions.

Black Book

Release Date: 10/08/2021

Platforms: PC, PS4, Switch and Xbox One

Skill Rating: 10+ year-olds

Components: 2D Side-On, Cards and Hand-Made

Black Book is a dark adventure, based on Slavic myths where you are a young sorceress. It combines a visual novel point-and-click adventure with card collecting to gain abilities to fight evil forces and explore the world where humans live alongside...

South of the Circle

Release Date: 20/10/2020

Platforms: Apple TV, Mac, PS4, Switch, Xbox One and iOS

Skill Rating: 10+ year-olds

Components: 3D Third-Person and Cartoon

South of the Circle is a narrative adventure game about, Peter, a Cambridge academic who finds himself fighting for survival in Antarctica during the 1960’s Cold War. You must cross desolate terrain to reach British, Norwegian and Soviet Antarctic...

The Wreck

Release Date: 15/03/2023

Platforms: Mac, PC, PS4, Switch and Xbox One

Skill Rating: 8+ year-olds

Components: 3D Third-Person

The Wreck is a narrative game where you play Junon, a mother at a crossroads. She's 36 but her career has stalled, she's emotionally numb, and her personal life is falling apart. It's not unfamiliar territory for a video game these days, but The Wreck...

Frog's Princess

Release Date: 09/12/2020

Platforms: Android, Mac and iOS

Skill Rating: 8+ year-olds

Components: 2D Side-On and Hand-Made

Frog's Princess is a narrative game about a kingdom surrounded by evil. You play a young princess who must save her kingdom. Along the way, you encounter a frog prince on a quest to rescue his bodyguard and find your plans overturned.

Leaving Lyndow

Release Date: 08/02/2017

Platforms: Mac, PC and PS4

Skill Rating: 10+ year-olds

Components: 3D First-Person and Open World

Leaving Lyndow is a narrative adventure set a couple of generations before Eastshade. Sharing the same anthropomorphized animal society, although here at an earlier stage, it's a game about the memories we make in the places we...

Mass Effect

Mass Effect (Series)

Release Date: 20/11/2007

Platforms: PC, PS3, PS4, Wii U, Xbox 360, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S and iOS

Components: 3D Third-Person and Open World

Mass Effect is a sci-fi adventure where you role-play a soldier named Commander Shepard, who must save the galaxy from a race of powerful mechanical beings. The series started in 2007 and has fourth substantial instalments that take you from that first...

Where the Water Tastes Like Wine

Release Date: 28/02/2018, updated in 2019

Platforms: Mac, PC, PS4, Switch and Xbox One

Skill Rating: 12+ year-olds

Components: 2D Side-On

Where the Water Tastes Like Wine is a narrative adventure game about sharing stories. You travel across the Depression-era United States discovering and collecting the stories of the people and places you encounter on your journey. You use this...

Please Knock On My Door

Release Date: 07/09/2017

Platforms: PC

Components: 2D Side-On and Cartoon

Please Knock on My Door is a narrative puzzle about someone suffering from depression and social anxiety. By making choices you help them get through work and reach out to friends. But more than the mechanics of self-care, the game engages with the...

Star Wars Eclipse

Release Date: Coming soon

Platforms: PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X|S

Components: 3D First-Person

Star Wars Eclipse is a narrative role-play set in the High Republic Era of the series, when the Jedi were in their golden age. Like Detroit: Become Human, Heavy Rain, and Beyond Two Souls, the action focuses on character choices and branching narrative...

Monorail Stories

Release Date: 30/09/2022

Platforms: Mac, PC and Switch

Skill Rating: 10+ year-olds

Components: 2D Side-On and Pixels

Monorail Stories is a narrative adventure where two people's lives are entwined by the journeys they take on the same monorail. You make choices for each character that can impact not only people on your commute but those on the other journey. It's...

Oxenfree II: Lost Signals

Release Date: Coming soon

Platforms: Mac, PC, PS4, PS5 and Switch

Skill Rating: 11+ year-olds

Components: 2D Overhead

Oxenfree II: Lost Signals is an unsettling narrative adventure and sequel to Oxenfree. Like that game, you guide your character through choices that affect the direction of the well-written and complex story and tune your radio...

The Lord of the Rings: Gollum

Release Date: 25/05/2023

Platforms: PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S

Skill Rating: 10+ year-olds

Components: 3D Third-Person

The Lord of the Rings: Gollum is a stealth traversal game set in Tolkien's Middle-Earth where you play Gollum after he escapes from Mordor. As you hunt for the One Ring, stolen by Bilbo Baggins, you ensure you remain hidden as you dash from one bit of...

The Vale: Shadow of the Crown

Release Date: 19/08/2021

Platforms: PC and Xbox One

Skill Rating: 10+ year-olds

Components: 2D Overhead, Day and Night, Hand-Made and Open World

The Vale: Shadow of the Crown is an audio-based role-play adventure where you play Alex, a blind princess. After your brother takes his place as king, you are made warden of a small castle on the outskirts of the kingdom. Without sight from birth and...

Thirsty Suitors

Release Date: Coming soon

Platforms: PC

Components: 3D Third-Person

Thirsty Suitors is a role play game where you play Jala, back in your home town of Timber Hills to confront mistakes, make up with exes and reconcile cultural differences with your parents. You talk to your family and old friends, take on turn-based...

Who Pressed Mute on Uncle Marcus?

Release Date: 18/03/2022

Platforms: PC, PS4 and Xbox One

Components: Filmed

Who Pressed Mute on Uncle Marcus? is a murder mystery game with footage of real actors. Your family meets to play a board game on zoom, but before you start you discover someone has poisoned Uncle Marcus. You have to both play the quiz and glean...

Svoboda 1945: Liberation

Release Date: 03/08/2021, updated in 2022

Platforms: Mac, PC, Switch and iOS

Skill Rating: 14+ year-olds

Components: Filmed

Svoboda 1945: Liberation is a narrative game that uses footage of real actors to tell an interweaving story about the aftermath of the Second World War. As you talk to the villagers, explore locations untouched for years and complete puzzles, you...

Triangle Strategy

Release Date: 04/03/2022, updated in 2022

Platforms: PC and Switch

Skill Rating: 10+ year-olds

Components: 2D Overhead, Blocks and Grid

Triangle Strategy is an action role-playing game that combines a complex branching plot with grid-based battles like Fire Emblem or Advance Wars. It stands out not only for its unusual diorama visuals, but by creating an intertwining story of many...

11-11 Memories Retold

Release Date: 08/11/2018

Platforms: PC, PS4 and Xbox One

Skill Rating: 12+ year-olds

Components: 3D Third-Person and Hand-Made

11-11 Memories Retold is a narrative adventure about two young men caught up in the first world war. A young photographer who joins the western front in Europe to impress a woman, and a German technician who's signs up in search of his son who is...

Ghost on the Shore

Release Date: 24/02/2022

Platforms: Mac and PC

Skill Rating: 10+ year-olds

Components: 3D Third-Person

Ghost on the Shore is a narrative adventure about emotional and community ties that last after people pass away. You encounter a headstrong ghost who urges you to investigate an island with a tragic secret. Choices in dialogue shape the bond between the...

King of Dragon Pass

Release Date: 01/01/1999

Platforms: Android, PC and iOS

Components: 2D Side-On and Text

King of Dragon Pass is a fantasy strategy game where you control barbarian clans settling in the dangerous frontier region of Dragon Pass.

Quantum Break

Release Date: 05/04/2016, updated in 2000

Platforms: PC and Xbox One

Skill Rating: 15+ year-olds

Components: 3D First-Person

Quantum Break is an adventure shooting game with action-packed combat sequences. You explore and influence a world where the time has been distorted, make important decisions in intense narrative scenes. Play is punctuated with live action TV-style...

Curated lists:
Game genre:
Style of Play:
Components:

How long to play:
User-generated content:	No
Accessibility features:	Yes

Controls
Gamepad:
Mouse And Keyboard:
Touchscreen:
Motion:	Motion Aiming Motion Pointing Motion Tilting Motion Gesture Motion Camera
Remap Controls:
Button Combinations:	Holding Down Buttons Optional Rapid Repeated Pressing Optional No Simultaneous Buttons
Controller Vibration:
Sensitivity:

Getting Started
Onboarding Before Play:
Assistance Getting Starting:	Tutorials Practice Area View Control Mapping Assistance With Controls Reaction-Time Not Critical Low Pressure Adjust Speed No Jump Scares
Assistance For Progressing:	Guaranteed Progress With God Mode Bank Progress With Frequent Checkpoints Assisted Progress With Boosts Assisted Progress With Hints Assisted Recall for Characters Assisted Recall for Narrative and Dialogue Save Progress Anytime

Reading
Reading Level:
Text Visibility:	Large Clear Text High Contrast Text
Subtitles:
Captions:
Voice Acted:

Navigation
Clarity:
Head-Up Display:
Menu Navigation:

Visual
Contrast:
Interactive Elements:
Visual Distractions:
Audio Cues for Visual Events:
Narration for Visual Elements:
	Motion Sickness Friendly
Colour Options:
Play Without Sight:
Violence:

Audio
	Balance Audio Levels
Audio Events:
	Play Without Hearing

Communication
Player-to-Player Online Communication:
Online Communication Assistance:

Difficulty
Difficulty Options:	Simple and Full Version No Memorisation Advantage No Hidden Information No Deceit Advantage No Colour Advantage No Mathematics Advantage No Weighing Decisions

Getting Started
Assistance Getting Started:	Clear Manual Electronic Version of Manual Electronic Version of Manual for Screen Readers Getting Started Video Digital Version Reference Aid
Assistance Progressing:	Play Order Tokens (Or play order doesn’t change) Reaction-Time Not Critical Low Pressure Low Impact Catch Up Rule

Reading
Reading Level:
Necessary Text Visibility:	Large Clear Text on Board (Or no text required) Large Clear Text on Cards (Or no text required) High Contrast Text (Or no text required) QR Code For Text (Or no text required) Primary and Secondary Text Distinguishable (Or no text required) Information Orientation Clear Icons

Physical
Pieces:	Components are Distinguishable by Touch Components are Replaceable No Non-Standard Dice (Or No Dice) No Tiny Pieces No Paper Money No Sprawl
Cards:	Large Card Size Standard Card Shape Limited Hand Management No Excessive Card Shuffling No Right-Handed Advantage
Placement:	No Unbound Placement Player Components Not Shared No Fiddly Placement Easily Verbalised Actions

Visual
Printed Visibility:	Colour Blind Friendly Design Double-Coding Colour High Contrast Colours
Component Identifiability:	Outline Key Elements No Busy Backgrounds Easily Verbalised Game State No Close Inspection Disadvantage Playable Without Sight

Audio
Communication:	Audio Cues Mirrored Visually (Or no critical audio signals) No Pressured Reveals No Pressured Communication Playable Without Hearing

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