Morton's Fork/Video Games

Quotes • Headscratchers • Playing With • Useful Notes • Analysis • Image Links • Haiku • Laconic

Examples of this trope in video games and visual novels

In the first Marvel Ultimate Alliance: In Mephisto's Realm, you are faced with the Sadistic Choice of letting either Nightcrawler or Jean Grey fall to their death (and it's impossible to save them both). At the end of the game, if you chose to save Nightcrawler, Jean comes back as the Dark Phoenix. On the other hand, if you chose to save Jean, Mystique (Nightcrawler's mother) murders Charles Xavier in revenge, and the X-Men consequently disband. Either way, the Watcher will tell you that "It was unfortunate..."
Deus Ex and its sequel.
- None of the endings are outright happy endings. In two endings of the sequel, they are decidedly downbeat.
- Also used throughout the game, a perfect example is Lebedev and Anna. If you want to save Lebedev, you have to kill Anna; if you don't do anything, Anna kills him and berates you (however, you can take a third option and knock Lebedev out, without killing either).
- After the mission to save Paul, if you investigated UNATCO, you know too much, so UNATCO turns against you. If not, you saved Paul, so UNATCO turns against you.
- Human Revolution is stuck here by default, since it's a prequel and presumably you should know what happens.
In Star Trek: Borg, while on the Borg ship you are given two options: fight the Borg or try to access the computer. Either way gets you assimilated by the Borg.
Runescape has a few. For example, Lucien gets the Staff Of Armadyl regardless of whether you help or not. Sigmund also dies regardless of whether you try to persuade Zanik not to kill him. Zanik herself dies regardless of whether or not you spare her in Mighty Fall. There are exceptions though, such as whether you decide to help Zaros return or hinder his efforts.
The most infamous quest in Fallout 3, Tenpenny Tower, has no good resolution. If you side with the bigots inside the Tower, you go off and massacre the Ghouls (most of whom, aside from Roy Phillips himself, were actually pretty decent people). If you side with Roy Phillips and storm the Tower, all the Tenpenny residents get massacred (again, most of them other than Tenpenny and Burke were decent if snooty people). If you think you're clever and try to Take a Third Option by using diplomacy to convince both sides to live together inside the Tower peacefully, it initially seems like a happy ending, but after a couple weeks Phillips flips out and massacres all the humans anyway. Not to mention, the humans die even if you kill Phillips before he does so.
- Likewise, the deliberately morally ambiguous DLC The Pitt has no completely good resolution. If you help Wernher overthrow Ashur, the slaves are freed, but without Ashur's scientific expertise and resources it's implied the cure for Trog Syndrome is highly unlikely to be discovered, and the slaves will either have to remain and face inevitable mutation or abandon their community for the hostile Wasteland. If you crush Wernher and let Ashur maintain the status quo, Ashur promises to free the slaves as soon as he discovers the Cure, but until then they'll have to live under the inhumanly brutal repression of his Raider lackeys, and it's also implied that Ashur lacks sufficient control over his Raiders to completely liberate the slaves ever if the Cure is released.
- The DLC Point Lookout also has this: When you have to choose whether to kill Desmond or Calvert, Calvert in both options will kill you (or try to do so).
This happens frequently in Fable I. For example, you are given the choice between sparing and killing the bandit leader Twinblade. If you spare him, he sends assassins after you shortly afterward. If you kill him, assassins come after you shortly after for revenge.
In Knights of the Old Republic II: Sith Lords:
- Your first visit to Nar Shadaa has you confronted with a beggar asking for money. Whether or not you give him anything, something horrible happens, ending with someone getting stabbed. The only difference is in who does the stabbing (the beggar if you didn't give him money) and in who is getting stabbed (the beggar if you did give him money). Kreia uses this as evidence for her Ayn Rand-esque personal philosophy.
- Whenever you make any choice that nets you light side or dark side points, Kriea will berate you for disturbing the balance of the universe. And for not choosing a side. Apathy is Death.
In Star Wars the Old Republic:
- Republic Trooper players get confronted with a classic halfway through the third chapter of their storyline - Havoc Squad respond to a distress call from Sergeant Ava Jaxo, a decidedly feisty young Special Forces soldier who is a non-companion romance option for male characters on Coruscant. Summoning them to a hidden Imperial prison facility currently containing more than three hundred important Republic personnel. Storming the prison goes smoothly at first but turns out to be a cunningly laid trap by Imperial General Rakton, who shows up with a fleet of destroyers and start shooting the station apart hard. The player is given the choice of A) diverting power from the maintenance levels where Sergeant Jaxo is hiding to the shields, which will kill her but buy enough time for all three hundred and fourteen prisoners to make it to the escape ship or B) rescuing Jaxo, who is begging for her life, but condemning half or more of the prisoners to die in the process and causing Jaxo to suffer from survivor's guilt and never forgive you.
In the ending of Grand Theft Auto IV, whether you choose to take the money or kill Dimitri in the penultimate mission, you will lose Kate. If you kill Dimitri, the mob boss you were working for gets pissed at you for souring the deal and kills Kate in a drive-by shooting. If you take the money, Kate will call you out on abandoning your morals and will leave you anyway. Taking the money also results in Dimitri betraying you for no reason and sending someone to kill you, which results in Roman getting killed.
In The Walking Dead: Season One, Lee dies regardless of his choice to cut off his bitten arm or not in episode 5 after he was bitten by a walker the episode prior.
The morality choices in Army of Two: The 40th Day are infamous for being like this; picking the obviously "bad" choice has negative consequences, but the seemingly "good" choice usually also results in a similarly crappy outcome later on.
None of the three endings to Singularity are "good", two are obvious bad endings while the third, seeming Golden Ending is also revealed to have negative consequences in a twist at the very end. More specifically, the endgame gives you the choice of either killing The Obi-Wan Barisov and ruling the world alongside Evil Overlord Demichev, killing Demichev and Barisov, or killing Demichev then sacrificing yourself to restore history to its rightful course.
- If you kill Demichev and Barisov, the world descends into chaos as the Soviet Union collapses while you rise as a ruthless dictator launching a campaign for world domination from the United States.
- If you kill Barisov and side with Demichev, the two of you take over the world under a totalitarian dictatorship and ultimately start a new Cold War against each other.
- If you kill Demichev and try to restore the original timeline by going to the past and stopping yourself from saving him in 1955, the world seems to return to normal and you're warped back to the beginning of the game, only this time your helicopter flies off into the sunset without incident instead of getting shot down by temporal distortion. However, The Reveal shows that it is not the original timeline, but rather one where Barisov took over the world himself under Soviet principles (although, given what you know of Barisov and your teammate's reaction to his statue, it's suggested his rule is at least possibly benevolent).
This is the entire point of fal'Cie Focuses from Final Fantasy XIII. Fail your Focus or give up on it? You get turned into a nightmarish shambling monster called a Ci'eth forever. Succeed in your Focus? You get turned into a pillar of crystal forever. You're screwed either way and that's the way the fal'Cie like it.
- A much harsher example in the sequel, regardless of whether Caius succeeds in killing the goddess or dies trying, time/the world is still ultimately screwed, arguably making all of your efforts pointless.
Alpha Protocol's entire story up until the last level. Every world location gives you a Sadistic Choice at some point. No matter what you do, the outcome is practically the same. Taipei? You let Ronald Sung get assassinated, which destabilizes the region and worsens Chinese-Taiwanese relations, or you let the Chinese plan to incite nationalist riots happen, which kills hundreds of people, destabilizes the region, and worsens Chinese-Taiwanese relations. Rome? Either you let the bomb explode, killing hundreds of people and tightening the EU's security policy, or you let Madison get killed, which renders her a martyr that, you guessed it, makes the EU tighten its security policy. Moscow? Almost no matter what you do, it's clear that Halbech won't have much problem finding another mafiya boss to smuggle weapons for them... Unless you go with Surkov, which means the rise of a Russian equivalent to Halbech under his leadership instead.
Alone in The Dark (2008): Let Sarah live, and she becomes a Tragic Monster. Kill her, and you become the monster.
If you try to skip Cosmo Canyon for the first time in Final Fantasy VII, you can either try to proceed on foot and discover that you need the buggy to cross the river, or try to proceed in the buggy and have it break down before you get to the river. Either way, you cannot progress past the river until you visit Cosmo Canyon.
Portal 2 sets one up in-story for the protagonist, Chell. After the plot twist midway through, she's confronted with the dilemma of putting the old Big Bad back in charge of the facility, who will likely kill her, or leaving the current one in charge, in which case the place will likely explode with her inside. Gameplay-wise, it's still a But Thou Must!.
Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels has two warp zones out of nine that actually send you back. If you didn't want to go back, the only other way was to jump into the pit. Of course, if you were playing for a high score, this would actually be beneficial.
In the "Dong Zhuo in Luo Yang" scenario in Dynasty Warriors 5 Empires, you get the option of participating in the Alliance Against Dong Zhuo after the first turn. If you take part and win, Dong Zhuo dies and his kingdom collapses. If you lose or don't take part, about a couple turns later Lu Bu kills Dong Zhuo and takes over his kingdom. No doubt a lot of DW5E players approved.
The second Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney game (Justice for All), features a version of this that takes up the entire plot of the last case. Phoenix's friend and legal assistant Maya Fey is kidnapped by an assassin and is told she will be killed unless he gets Matt Engarde, a suspect in a murder, found innocent. Over time Phoenix finds out that his client is truly guilty (he hired the assassin holding Maya hostage to kill the victim) and that if his client gets off the hook, another suspect, a truly innocent woman, will be charged and executed for the murder. Therefore, Phoenix must choose between defending a killer to save a friend while an innocent person is killed as a murderer, or letting said friend die to see justice done as well as saving a innocent woman's life. That being said, with Phoenix being a morally upstanding attorney who fights for justice, this choice is not so simple for him. However in the end Phoenix manages to Take a Third Option and shows the assassin holding Maya hostage how much of immoral monster said assassin's client is, along with proof that Engarde was planning on selling out the assassin anyway. Since this assassin strongly believes that Even Evil Has Standards, he eventually drops his agreement with Engarde and lets Maya go, giving Engarde no leg to stand on. This twists the situation around so that Engarde is now the one facing a Morton's Fork: either he gets off as "not guilty" of the crime but the assassin will kill him for his act of betrayal, or he goes to jail to face the death penalty. No matter what Phoenix does at that point, Engarde snaps and screams in court that he's guilty.
Persona 3 gives us the choice offered by Ryoji/The Appriser to the members of SEES regarding Nyx and The Fall. He offers to take their memories away by killing him so that they'll be able to live the last few months unaware of the impending doom, before they all die or choose to let him live, in which case they can count the days until Nyx's arrival and fighting Nyx would only put them in death row before everybody else. The choice that the player makes determines the ending of the game.
One of the many sidequests in Xenoblade requires you to fetch a jewel used as an engagement present and give it to one of two corners of a love triangle. However, Shulk's precognition tells him that the woman, at least, will end up unhappy either way.
A small side quest in The Elder Scrolls 3: Tribunal deals with a down on his luck elf who asks you for some gold. If you give him gold, he'll demand more and more until he finally declares you're lying about having that much gold and are trying to mock him with your kindness. If you turn him down at any point, he declares you to be a heartless bastard. If you attack him, he vanishes. Either way, he reappears later as a Boss in Mook Clothing.

Back to Morton's Fork