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Video games provide an opportunity for people to become engrossed in a story in a way no other genre, book, film or comic, is able to. It’s also the one genre where the more back story the better and plot tangents are engaging rather than infuriating.

There are a lot of well written games, and as more attention has begun to be paid to storyline the number is increasing, but some of them just stand out among the rest.

4. Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem
In this horror game, made for the Nintendo GameCube, you play twelve different characters in twelve different points in history as they all battle to keep an ancient godlike creature from entering our dimension (well, eleven of them try at any rate).

There are four main locations, spread across the world, which you return to as different characters. It’s not just getting to come back and find actions you performed as a previous character helpful to you now, it’s also the original ways they managed to reuse each setting, making them always seem different, that makes the experience interesting and creative.

You play characters as far back as 26 BC and as recent as 2000 AD. The different characters, together with the different weapons available in each area, continually forces you to change your strategies.

The dialog is limited, but powerful and creepy and the setting and characters weave a perfect horror story. As a bonus a mind-blowing secret ending can be unlocked after you play through the game three times.

3. Braid
Braid is probably the best argument that I can think of for video games as an art form. An independent, platform, puzzle game, everything about it is beautiful. The art work is breathtaking, the music is beautiful and the story is thought provoking.

The writing in the game weaves a story mysterious, haunting and beautiful, and then pulls in incredible plot twist that just bowls you over. The kind of plot twist that all plots twists should emulate; it makes sense with the story, adds to the story and has a reason to be part of the story.

2. Portal 2
The Portal series has incredibly well written dialog with a heavy dose of dark humor. Portal 2 explores the backstory of the series further and opens up the story to introduce a few new characters.

One of the strengths of the Left 4 Dead series, other than it’s just fun to shoot zombies, is how unique the story telling is. Where other games tend to have you run into characters who will sit you down and give you ten minutes of backstory, in the Left 4 Dead world you piece it together yourself, from brief one-liners, graffiti on the walls, posted signs and sometimes the very zombies you’re fighting.

The Portal Series, made by the same company, uses a similar technique. While there is a far heavier reliance on dialog, you can also learn the history of the science facility around you and possible clues to your characters identity, from looking around. It’s inventive and encourages the curious.
But the humor is the back bone of the game; a constant stream of black comedy that adds both creepiness and something to laugh about at the same time.

1. Planescape: Torment
Planescape: Torment is not your typical RPG. It follows The Nameless One, a man who wakes up in a mortuary with no memory of who he is or even his own name. Like Braid, Planescape: Torment shows what can be done with video game writing. It shows a world and ideas that couldn’t be communicated in any other format and uses a fantasy world to make you think about humanity, morality and mortality in a way no other game has ever been able to do before or since.