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A game that challenges your moral code

“Moirai” employs simple pixelated graphics.

I frequently get bored by how moral conundrums in games play out. For a long time, games have promised to pose interesting moral questions, but often these promises collapse into fairly trite gameplay and story mechanics: You can be a good person or a bad person. You can make moral choice X or moral choice Y, and each will yield a different outcome. Yawn.

How does it feel, on the other hand, when games do morality well? It feels the same way as when other media do morality well — when they knock you off balance a little, or reveal parts of yourself you didn’t know existed. When “The Sopranos” makes you feel deeply uncomfortable with yourself for “rooting” for Tony despite his sociopathic behavior, that’s what I’m talking about.

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Games do sometimes pull this off. And I just came across a strange and compelling example: “Moirai,” a free indie game released in July by Chris Johnson, Brad Barrett, and John Oestmann.

First-person “Moirai” is very short — we’re talking 5 or 10 minutes, if you race through — with simple pixelated graphics. It’s sort of like wandering around in a diorama — there’s a flatness to most of the game’s visual features. It unspools itself much like many role-playing games, in that you start in a small village, and begin talking to other characters. There’s a priest, a little girl, and so on.

These characters tell you a bit about what’s going on. You are quickly directed to a cave just outside of town; someone’s gone missing. This, too, is an RPG trope: Go retrieve someone who fell down a hole somewhere and needs rescuing. Easy!

Except in this case, it isn’t easy. You go into the cave, you’re given a knife to protect yourself by someone waiting near the entrance, and then . . . There’s a twist I definitely didn’t see coming. I won’t spoil it here, but it stuck with me long afterward.

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I thought about how choices like the ones I made in “Moirai” might ripple outward in real life. And those choices actually did, in a very real way, affect me after I had turned the game off — all because of a modest insight about how a game like this could work that the developers had executed beautifully.

Games don’t usually pull off this sort of thing. That’s why “Moirai” is such a strange little treat


Jesse Singal can be reached at jesse.r.singal@gmail.com.