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Top 20 Video Games With The Most Complex Stories

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Ignacio Weil

Gaming - September 22nd 2026, 18:30 GMT+2

Cropped Nier Automata — 20. NieR: Automata (2017)

The first credits roll in *NieR: Automata* is a particularly convincing invitation to stop playing far too early. Revisiting events through 9S reveals information that 2B’s perspective withheld, before later routes push the story into new territory. Even the machines you have been cheerfully dismantling develop beliefs, attachments, and communities. Understanding the war means questioning both your orders and your own willingness to follow them. | © Square Enix

Cropped Guilty Gear — 19. Guilty Gear (1998)

Sol Badguy’s name suggests a man with very little to explain. His history strongly disagrees. Across *Guilty Gear*, the bounty hunter’s connections to magical biological weapons gradually expose the personal relationships behind a devastating war. Scientific experiments become family tragedies, and supposed villains acquire inconvenient context. The elaborate terminology takes patience, but following who loved, betrayed, or transformed whom makes this sprawling fighting-game saga considerably easier to grasp. | © Arc System Works

Cropped Alan Wake — 18. Alan Wake (2010)

Finding a manuscript page describing your immediate future would be unsettling enough without recognizing your own writing. In *Alan Wake*, the missing authorial memory matters as much as the missing wife: Alan must work out how a horror story he cannot remember writing is becoming real. Television episodes, local legends, and another writer’s legacy complicate the investigation, while every apparent explanation comes from someone with incomplete knowledge. | © Remedy Entertainment

17. Deadly Premonition (2010)

York’s habit of talking to an unseen companion seems perfectly ordinary beside Greenvale’s other eccentricities. That is useful camouflage for *Deadly Premonition*, which threads its murder investigation through routines, strange conversations, and apparently ridiculous distractions. Sorting out the killer’s identity only resolves part of the mystery; York’s own history changes how the investigation reads. The comedy gives you room to get attached before the story collects on that attachment. | © Access Games

Cropped Bio Shock Infinite — 16. BioShock Infinite (2013)

Listen closely to the music drifting through Columbia: *BioShock Infinite* starts suggesting that its world is wrong well before explaining why. Elizabeth’s ability to open tears in reality turns Booker’s rescue mission into a problem involving incompatible histories and memories. The city’s racism and religious nationalism remain crucial, because its leader’s carefully manufactured identity connects the political spectacle to the increasingly personal mystery. Even the background entertainment carries evidence. | © Irrational Games / 2K Games

Cropped Killer7 — 15. Killer7 (2005)

International relations become deeply unpleasant in *Killer7*, where assassination jobs expose competing schemes involving Japan, the United States, and the monstrous Heaven Smiles. Then the identities of the assassins themselves become another problem to solve. Harman Smith’s shifting personae make even a basic question—who is carrying out these killings?—surprisingly slippery. Abrupt transitions and surreal encounters demand interpretation, with Garcian’s investigation eventually forcing earlier missions into a disturbing new context. | © Capcom

Cropped Five Nights at Freddys — 14. Five Nights at Freddy’s (2014)

A newspaper clipping on a pizzeria wall should not require this much scrutiny. Yet *Five Nights at Freddy’s* builds its larger mystery from precisely the details a terrified security guard might overlook. Later games add cryptic minigames and incidents that complicate the chronology, making players reconstruct the murders behind the mascots. The important distinction is between what the games establish and what an extremely persuasive theory video has convinced you happened. | © Scott Cawthon

Cropped Destiny — 13. Destiny (2014)

Your gun can have a more informative backstory than the mission you brought it on. *Destiny* initially put much of its world-building in Grimoire cards read outside the game, establishing a divide between shooting aliens and understanding them. Across the series, competing accounts of ancient civilizations complicate the apparent simplicity of Light versus Darkness. The Hive’s beliefs are especially revealing: their brutality follows a philosophy, with consequences extending far beyond individual villains. | © Bungie

Cropped Hotline Miami 2 — 12. Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number (2015)

Keeping track of who killed whom is only the beginning of *Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number*. Its scrambled chronology moves between soldiers, criminals, a writer, and fans imitating the first game’s violence, revealing connections across apparently separate lives. Scenes from a film add another layer of uncertainty. Everyone has a preferred explanation for the bloodshed, but seeing their stories overlap makes those explanations look increasingly self-serving—and horribly inadequate. | © Dennaton Games

Cropped Drakengard — 11. Drakengard Saga (2003)

Caim’s pact with a dragon costs him his voice, establishing early that *Drakengard* attaches consequences to its fantasy bargains. Following the series requires tracking branching outcomes and a prequel whose relationship to the original is less straightforward than its numbering suggests. One route even supplies the catastrophe behind *NieR*. These connections turn apparently peripheral endings into major historical events; dismissing the strangest one as a joke would be a serious mistake. | © Square Enix

Cropped Blaz Blue — 10. BlazBlue (2008)

A character ending is usually permission to celebrate and pick another fighter. *BlazBlue* makes it another piece of evidence. Branching scenarios and repeating events gradually reveal the forces manipulating Ragna the Bloodedge, while artificial beings and alternate identities complicate his already disastrous family relationships. The challenge is recognizing how individual routes relate to the larger sequence of events. Learning the combos may genuinely be the less demanding half of the assignment. | © Arc System Works

Cropped Xenosaga — 9. Xenosaga (2002)

Naming three RPGs after works by Nietzsche is fair warning that the robots will not be the whole conversation. *Xenosaga* connects Shion Uzuki’s work on KOS-MOS to the Gnosis, buried memories, and organizations pursuing incompatible plans for humanity. Its religious references accompany concrete questions about consciousness and existence, rather than merely decorating the scenery. Personal grief matters at a cosmic scale, which makes separating the character drama from the mythology almost impossible. | © Monolith Soft / Namco

Cropped Bloodborne — 8. Bloodborne (2015)

Yharnam’s medical establishment has a catastrophic relationship with informed consent. Investigating its blood treatments in *Bloodborne* leads from a beast plague into experiments involving beings beyond human understanding. Much of that history survives in descriptions, abandoned research sites, and the consequences still wandering the streets. Increasing Insight can literally change what you perceive, making knowledge part of the horror while leaving plenty of room to dispute what the evidence means. | © FromSoftware

Cropped Chrono Cross — 7. Chrono Cross (1999)

Discovering a world where you died as a child is an excellent reason to cancel your afternoon plans. Serge’s predicament in *Chrono Cross* expands into a dispute over parallel histories, manipulated populations, and the consequences of *Chrono Trigger*. Switching worlds lets you meet people whose lives took different paths, giving the enormous backstory a human scale. Then bodies change hands, and keeping track of the protagonist becomes its own substantial administrative burden. | © Square Enix

Cropped Silent Hill — 6. Silent Hill (1999)

Harry Mason understands the assignment: find his daughter. Almost everyone offering directions has made it considerably harder. The original *Silent Hill* entangles that search with a cult’s ambitions, Alessa’s suffering, and a supernatural relationship between two girls. Following the plot requires recognizing manipulation through deliberately fragmentary explanations. Its nightmare imagery also has a specific personal source, making the school and hospital more than interchangeable locations stocked with things that want Harry dead. | © Konami

Cropped Death Stranding — 5. Death Stranding (2019)

Delivering medicine is straightforward; explaining why your baby detects the dead requires considerably more orientation. *Death Stranding* gives Sam a practical job inside a world governed by unfamiliar rules about death, time, and human connection. The mysteries surrounding his family and the Beaches gradually intersect with his mission to reconnect isolated settlements. Explanations arrive in stages, repeatedly changing the meaning of images and relationships you thought you understood several deliveries ago. | © Kojima Productions

4. Lobotomy Corporation / Library of Ruina (2018)

Employee welfare is a flexible concept in *Lobotomy Corporation*, where extracting energy from dangerous Abnormalities conceals a much larger experiment. Its revelations about memory and the facility’s purpose carry directly into *Library of Ruina*, where defeated visitors become books. Angela links the two stories, while Roland helps expose the society outside the laboratory. Understanding either institution means confronting how suffering becomes a resource—and how its victims can learn to exploit others. | © Project Moon

Cropped Metal Gear Solid — 3. Metal Gear Solid Saga (1998–present)

Correctly identifying Snake is an achievement before the mission has even started. *Metal Gear Solid* follows different generations of soldiers through cloning, shifting allegiances, and institutions that manipulate both conflict and information. Prequels complicate what later characters believe about their predecessors, while sequels revisit the machinery behind earlier operations. Keeping the chronology straight helps, but the harder task is separating a soldier’s intentions from the political uses made of their actions. | © Konami

Cropped Final Fantasy — 2. Final Fantasy Saga (1987–present)

Treating *Final Fantasy* as one gigantic continuity would make it unnecessarily difficult: most numbered installments introduce separate worlds. The complications emerge within particular games, from Cloud’s unreliable account of his past to the time travel and divine agendas of the *Final Fantasy XIII* trilogy. Familiar creatures and terminology provide surprisingly little protection against a fresh cosmology. Each adventure teaches you its rules, then reveals which characters have misunderstood or deliberately concealed them. | © Square Enix

Cropped Kingdom Hearts — 1. Kingdom Hearts (2002)

Donald Duck is reliable company in a universe where a familiar face does not guarantee a familiar person. *Kingdom Hearts* builds increasingly elaborate distinctions between hearts, bodies, memories, and replicas, then sends characters across time to test those distinctions. Essential developments happen outside the numbered installments, so skipping an apparently optional adventure can leave a sizeable hole in the story. Sora’s loyalties stay understandable even when everyone else’s identity needs checking. | © Disney / Square Enix

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Finishing a game should leave you with fewer questions than you had at the start. Try telling that to the writers who buried the answers in an item description you never read. The video games with the most complex stories demand attention to fractured timelines, unreliable narrators, and alliances that take a second playthrough to untangle. At their best, those details make every discovery satisfying; at their most baffling, they leave you wondering whether you missed a cutscene—or an entire sequel.

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Finishing a game should leave you with fewer questions than you had at the start. Try telling that to the writers who buried the answers in an item description you never read. The video games with the most complex stories demand attention to fractured timelines, unreliable narrators, and alliances that take a second playthrough to untangle. At their best, those details make every discovery satisfying; at their most baffling, they leave you wondering whether you missed a cutscene—or an entire sequel.