Dialogue is important in a lot of games. Its main purpose is to tell stories or provide you with instructions to follow. Either way, it’s usually secondary to the title’s main gameplay, which could involve fighting people, driving things, or doing any other interesting activity.
Some games, however, place extra importance on dialogue. It isn’t just something you hear or read; it’s a significant part of gameplay. Maybe you have to convince someone to do something or persuade them to tell the truth by choosing the right dialogue options. This makes it feel like you’re battling with the characters you’re talking to. Here is a collection of these types of games.
8Sherlock Holmes: Crimes And Punishments
In Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments, you play as the titular detective and must solve a series of crimes. This means exploring crime scenes, finding evidence, and piecing things together. Talking to suspects and witnesses is also key to any investigation.
However, they won’t always be straight shooters. They will sometimes attempt to lie to you. When they do, you have a small window to interject and then select the right piece of evidence to prove they’re not telling the truth. Succeeding in these moments is important to be able to solve the investigation.
Saying that dialogue in The Secret of Monkey Island ‘feels’ like combat is a bit of an understatement. The sword-fighting system in this game is completely powered by insults.
Therefore, you don’t strike your opponents in this game; you hit them with a bit of trash talk. Each insult has a perfect response. If someone selects the correct comeback, they force their opponent back, but if they pick the wrong one, they go back. Things like this are why The Secret of Monkey Island remains one ofthe funniest games ever.
Life is Strange: Before The Storm puts you in the shoes of the rebellious teenager Chloe Price. In the first game, she is an ally to the protagonist, Max Caulfield. Unlike Max, Chloe doesn’t have a special skill to rewind time. She does, however, have the gift of gab.
This is shown in the Backtalk gameplay mechanic, which triggers during some conversations. The idea is you enter a battle of wits with your opponent where each person gets a point for winning a verbal exchange. To win, you must listen to what your opponent says and select a comeback that reflects those words back at them. If you acquire enough points, you win the exchange.
Disco Elysium is a deep and complex RPG thatdoesn’t contain traditional combat. That doesn’t mean that things are always upbeat and wholesome in this title. After all, the game revolves around a murder mystery that you’re investigating.
During your investigation, you get into various conversations with people. On some occasions, you need to use your wits to get the better of the person you’re speaking to and convince them of something. Also, throwing a punch is sometimes part of a dialogue option. This is the closest thing the game has to combat.
Griftlands is a roguelike deck-building game that includes turn-based combat. Yet, even though the title already has combat, dialogue still feels like a battle. Not every conversation feels that way, but the negotiations certainly do.
They also play out like a turn-based skirmish where you use cards to deal blows to your opponent. However, these are verbal blows as you attempt to outwit your opposition and convince them to come around to your way of thinking. There are plenty of negotiation cards and approaches you can take to these encounters, so there is a lot of strategy involved.
3The Council
In the episodic narrative game known as The Council, you play as a man looking for his mother. At the start of the game, he arrives on an island where a secret society is meeting.
You mainly walk around the place and look for clues, but things get really tense during what the game calls ‘confrontations.’ These are like verbal boss battles where you need to select the correct dialogue options to continue. What makes them feel even more like combat is that you have a specific number of blunders you’re able to make before you fail the encounter, which work in a similar way to lives.
Unlike most ofRockstar’s other best games, L.A. Noire doesn’t feature a lot of violence - though there is some. This is because you don’t play as a gangster or criminal. Instead, you’re an L.A. detective in the 1940s. So, you have to investigate a slew of crimes.
Along the way, you converse with plenty of suspects and witnesses. When they answer a question you ask, you can either choose to believe them, doubt them, or call them a liar - the latter will require evidence as proof. To figure out whether they’re telling the truth, you need to study their facial expressions. There’s no minigame for this; you literally need to look at their face and see if they look shifty.
Courtrooms are a classic battleground for verbal skirmishes, and that’s where you spend much of your time in Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney. This is because you play as a defense attorney in this visual novel game. In multiple separate cases, you must attempt to defend the primary suspect.
The main way you do this is by cross-examining witnesses. This means asking them questions and picking up any lies or inconsistencies in their stories. If you want to win the case, you need to be right when you call them out on their lies. It really feels like a battle against the opposition lawyer and, sometimes, the witnesses themselves.
