18 Super Messed Up Decisions Video Games Have Forced You To Make

After an already less-than-ideal journey through post-apocalyptic America, life kicks the hero Lee Everett in the gut one last time. It turns out your character is destined to turn into a zombie whether or not you chose to hack off his bite-infected arm earlier. The player has one final decision to determine his fate: does he join the walking dead or ask his young charge Clem end his life.

It's a harrowing task for a little girl to undertake, but it's also a valuable parting lesson that to survive in the grim reality of the Walking Dead games, there will be tough choices to make.

After spending five episodes amongst the good people of Arcadia Bay making emotional connections and using your unique gifts to help solve their problems, you're forced to choose whether or not to save the town from peril. To do so means going back in time and un-doing the incredibly brave and awesome rescue of your BFF from the hands of a killer you performed at the beginning of the game, though.

What should you do? A wise Vulcan once said, "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few." That's easy for Spock to say though. He'd never sacrifice his precious Kirk to save a bunch of Oregon townies.

In Mass Effect, the Krogans are a particularly nasty and durable species known for decimating planets and reproducing at a whopping rate. This all adds up to a race that could easily conquer and occupy every planet in the known universe. In fact, that's just what the Krogans started doing before the Salarians deployed the Genophage, a biological device that reduced Krogan birth survival to 1 out of every 1000.

In Mass Effect 3, Shepard has a chance to cure the Genophage (and potentially make way for another Krogan Rebellion) or be complicit in sabotaging the cure, which also requires you to take out your good buddy Mordin in cold blood. Moralists will say the choice is clear, but moralists might sing a different tune once they're faced with an intergalactic Krogan dictatorship.

It's a long, convoluted story, but the protagonist of Fallout 4 eventually reunites with his long-lost son, who is now older than he is (again, long story) and the leader of an arguably evil faction of synths and their makers. The player can then go the sentimental route and join up with junior or lead another faction against him, burning all that his son has worked for to the ground. Aggressive players also have the option of taking their son out directly, but whatever the player chooses, his son dies anyway because he has incurable cancer, which is pretty messed up in and of itself.

While the Little Sisters of Bioshock are creepy threats who spend all day harvesting ADAM from fallen splicers, they're still just helpless little girls once you take down their giant protectors. So what do you do with them? In a show of true devilish manipulation, the game rewards you with twice the amount of ADAM if you eliminate them.

But, if you do the right thing and save the sisters from the hold of their sea slugs, Tenenbaum will reward you with gifts, and you'll get the extra happy ending of escaping rapture with all of them. Rather than stop players with one titanic choice, the game subtly challenges players to weigh whether their character's strength is worth the loss of fictional innocents in the game.

After defeating Matriarch Benezia on Noveria, the Rachni Queen, a giant telepathic bug, is left to be dealt with. She asks for mercy from Shepard, insinuates that the cruelty inflicted by her species was caused by outside forces, and claims her only intention is to rebuild her species peacefully. The player can then allow her to go free, saving the Rachni species from total obliteration, or splatter that bug with prejudice. Can you live with the extermination of an entire sentient (albeit disgusting) species?