What is the Darkest CYOA game on choice of games?

I’ve found out the hard way my sense of humour doesn’t tend to convey well over text. Trying for a dark comedy might well be taken seriously and make things worse :confounded:

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A “cool” skeleton body devoid of every simple pleasure you ever had in life, including a sense of taste, smell or touch. Said body has to be heavily maintained in order to not simply collapse into atrophy and uselessness, which means feeding yourself souls to maintain it, which means more work.

It’s an immortal future where the one thing you really have to look forward to is more work.

But hey, skeletons are pretty cool.

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Definitely Paradox Factor. The only CoG piece that ever really depressed me and one I never ever touched again. A great and thought-provoking game, but way too dark and hopeless for me.

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The City’s Thirst has a pretty grim tone - you’re a traumatised survivor of a horrific magical war, and there’s a lot of scope for betraying your morals and friends.

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From the ones I’ve played I would say either Versus (its a game where you kill off several characters that you befriend as you go) or It’s Killing Time (because it seems to be the most violent from what I remember?)

Funnily enough, I’m reading As I Lay Dying right now and the dark comedy was emphasized towards me.

If we are including wips, there was this really old unfinished wip. The Empire Saga: Corruption was pretty fun. Otherwise Paradox Factor is all about you failing to fix your broken mess of a life.

SOH3

First, Oh trying to make a sympathetic villian.

Second, Oh trying to make Hatch less Shonin.

Thir— wait WTF, screw this I’m playing Fatehaven.

Fourth, “Screw You.” sobs.

I’m surprised that Choice of Rebels hasn’t really come up. I haven’t played most of the other games though, so maybe they’re just way, way darker and I have no idea what I’m talking about.

In Choice of Rebels it’s not too difficult to avoid bad things happening to most of the main characters (?) but it’s really easy to get a ton of people killed and the theme itself is incredibly dark (blood magic slavery) and the author does a good job of making the world basically fucking awful.

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I think Burn(t) is really dark. You can die in really many graphic ways. Also, your parents and friends die, and you can kill them yourself.

I didn’t find COG dark just a classic adventure revolution. I don’t know maybe I am desensitized.

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I just finished Paradox Factor and it was…depressing. Glad you guys mentioned it here otherwise I wouldn’t have played.

SOH 3, was a lot darker than the first 2 I have to admit. (I still haven’t finished it because I really do not want to go through the ending. But I’ll have to eventually.)

Highlands also seemed pretty grim to me. (Also never finished it because I keep messing up and the first part broke me.)

And Lost Heir…

I died. Multiple times. And reading what happens during and after that was not fun.

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I personally found Paradox Factor more Philosophical on the nature of life and regret, no matter the choices you make, rich or poor, the path ends the same way, you can’t change anything and to enjoy life one must accept that.

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Zombie Exodus maybe? There are some quite depressing endings in it, and it is super easy to die.
Not to mention you have to deal with other peoples sanity problem.

Or perhaps Neighbourhood Necromancer ? Although it is technically a comedy, still, you get to kill your classmates; see your parents get ripped by zombies; or even cause genocide in your neighborhood and eradicate the entire town. Horray! :clown_face::man_cook:

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Highlands would definitely be my number one pick for this thread. That’s the only CoG/HG which I found too scary for a second playthrough. (Also a bit off but I didn’t appreciate that jumpscary picture about… Err… Whatever that creature was).

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Well, I’m not really into many revolutionary fictional stories but COR included more stories of rape, torture, and god-sanctioned murder than most COGs I’ve played

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Okay to simply put it, you believe DAO to be dark fantasy then you can find COR dark, but it takes a bit more for me to turn on the lights.

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
“Good-morning,” and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich—yes, richer than a king—
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.

Darkness to me is the subversion of light, COR failed in feeling dark by starting out with sadness, not ending with it.

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Ah, yes! I forgot that one! Neighbourhood Necromancer also had some dark moments. Especially if you go down the dark path…

Oh it definitely has at least vaguely hopeful endings in my experience. That weakens it as a dark story, but I don’t think that it necessarily disqualifies it. Maybe moreso the premise is dark for me than the actual completion of the game.

Well the entire point of Paradox Factor was to show that even if you could time travel and change the past to better yourself or your life there would always be repercussions and problems in life.

You either get the ending were you never time travel in the first place because you caused the Paradox by doing dark things or you just accept which set of circumstances you like the best and live with them.

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Let’s not forget why and where we get the mute.

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