I guess someone has to mention Gilded Rails which is railroaded in a different way.
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Too late, hot plate.
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In almost all cases I would say that any choice offered to the player should have some form of meaningful impact on events and generally the one they’d expect. However, you can have a good choice where it doesn’t matter what you pick, if the reason it doesn’t matter is because your character’s actions cannot matter, as long as this is done sparingly.
I have a specific example in mind from the game Six Ages, which has events that act very much like a choicescript game (they’re interwoven with a resource management game) and it gets a narrative high point by having a choice where you can pick a wide variety of responses to an ominous sign and then when you get the next event it is clear that all you did was make yourselves feel better (morale is a mechanic so that’s not nothing) but that only works because it’s something you simply cannot meaningfully stop or intervene in; it will happen and you must deal with the consequences.
It starts with odd creaking sounds, then a glowing crack forms in the sky, and you have various options to just brace for the worst or organize a magical ritual to heal the crack. How well you do the ritual doesn’t matter; a dying god falls from the sky, one of the clans you’ve been interacting with is annihilated in an instant, and a wall of fire races towards your lands. You get to try to protect exactly one of your assets before it arrives and incinerates roughly half of everything you didn’t protect and a quarter of what you did.
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I always ended up getting a bad ending in that game my MC died as a drug addict. Never managed to figure out how to get a better ending with Punk band.
Whoops. The search function was laggy, so I didn’t see your post.
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No worries. It’s a big thread, easy to miss something thirty posts up.
Hey stop it with that kindness here.
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Pretty sure it was mentioned already but the most obvious game what pops into my mind would be The Hero Project series. While some people say the Heroes Rise was railroaded too at least we get some choices regarding our MCs personality be someone who follows laws or lawless etc. But with the THP series it really feelt like while we got several choices it didn’t matter, there was one kind of style we had to follow or be punished.
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In Silent Gear the whole business with Catherine and The Defector made me feel less like Evelyn the Special Forces Commando and more like Solid Snake/Big Boss but female. Like despite the game not asking my sexuality I’m obviously interested in both based on the writing style. Which isn’t really my thing when playing a military Character. In Military games my Character’s only love is war and only death or an powerful superweapon rendering the war meaningless ends that relationship.