Best Game Premises Ever

[DEAD34345]

Liberal Crime Squad is probably the game with the greatest premise I've ever played, and importantly, it totally delivers on that premise. Here's the best description of it I could find with 30 seconds of Google-fu:

"Liberal Crime Squad is a satirical open-source text-based modern strategic political RPG with bad pickup lines and bad graphics. You play as the founder of a left-wing terrorist cell devoted to saving the United States from its descent into Conservative Insanity though writing to newspapers, volunteering, playing protest music, seduction, flag burning, graffiti, hacking, kidnapping, torture, murder, brainwashing, and other common and uncommon activist activities."

So basically you play as a bunch of hippie terrorists in a random American city, and you have to use any means at your disposal to turn the evil Arch Conservative tide and prevent the country from becoming a BACKWOODS YET CORPORATE NIGHTMARE! Or more likely, you go around dressed as a police officer stealing peoples' mobile phones and macaroni art, set up a huge prostitution ring, crash a van full of naked immigrants in a police chase, and then get executed on the spot by the Death Squad after being caught selling "magic" brownies.

At least, that's my experience of it, anyway.

 

[The Wykydtron]

So you go on an epic 40/50 hour journey to discover the identity of a serial murderer while fighting monsters inside a TV with your friends. The boss monster will also run an in depth psychological struggle on the character flaws of a soon to be party member. That or it hits you over the head with Nietzsche philosophy on the nature of truth.

Persona 4 is so fucking amazing...

Also BlazBlue CS:EX. It's a sprawling timeline with several possibilities for every character (only the true ending is canon so they can really go crazy on some things) and Hazama trolls the entire cast in practically every single ending of every single route aside from but in a roundabout way also including the true ending, it's so good.

 

[Aerosteam]

I don't care how much some people go on about it, Dangan Ronpa's premises is really cool, it's pretty much Pheonix Wright meets The Hunger Games (or Battle Royale if you want to be fancy).

15 students wake up in a high school run by a psychotic teddy bear. The students decide if they want to stay in the school forever (which has facilities that will never run out) or try to escape. The only way to do that is to murder another student and get away with it.

When a body is found by at least 3 people, an investigation starts to try and find clues on who might be the killer. When the time is up a classroom trial begins and so do accusations. By the end of the trail everyone votes on who they think is the killer. If the person who did the murder gets the most votes, that person is executed and everyone else lives on but if that's not the case the killer escapes and everyone else is executed.

I haven't played the game myself but the animated series was quite decent.

 

[lacktheknack]

You play a freelance hacker who stumbles on technology that could completely destroy the whole internet.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a5/Uplink_box_art.jpg

Absolutely brilliant.

 

[Frankster]

You're the head of a global organization that is our first and last line of defence against insidious alien invaders with unspeakable plans for humanity, you hand pick your international squad and tool them up with equipment made by the finest engineers the planet can offer, based on advances derived from captured alien tech made by the brightest human minds.

Xcom/Xenonauts/UFO series, fuck yeah.

 

[Hawk of Battle]

Achron, a sci-fi RTS where you can command time itself. Send units back in time to help themselves in battles, rewrite history on a whim, speed up or slow down time, even create paradoxes. And all in multiplayer too. Oh and you can also play as 2 completely different alien races, one of whom grow all their units from combinations of their 3 sexes.

 

[TheEvilCheese]

Spore (original concept) no doubt. Not saying it was ever going to turn out well but for me it's unbeatable.

 

[josemlopes]

The spoilered premise of Second Sight is cool as fuck

Spoiler

You are an amnesiac dude with psychic powers that wakes up in a hospital (generic so far). After some flashbacks you learn that you went previously on a special ops mission where your unit got mauled by the enemy and the few survivors left are either homeless fugitives or insane on an asylum. At the end you realize that the flashbacks are actually the present and you are having visions of the most possible future, you can still save your friends and yourself

 

[Quazimofo]

You are a cyborg ninja whose sword defies the laws of physics in the name of cutting things into fantastic giblets. An organization is trying to re-ignite armed conflict across the entirety of africa in the name of money. Are you a bad enough dude to take on their army of cyborgs, robots, ninjas, samurai, and cyborg ninja samurai and stop their plot to turn Africa into a war zone?

Hmm, now that I write that out it doesn't sound as great as I thought. Still, Metal Gear Rising was AWESOME!

 

[william12123]

Assassin's creed (or at least when you are in the animus). Why? Because all video game tropes make sense.

-Save/reload: de-sync from the memory
-A bunch of generic people wandering around with certain specific individuals having more detail? That matches very well with how we process people in our memory.
-Cutscenes: The event is so important/notable that it was "fixated" in the ancestor's mind.

This is the main reason why I believe no AC game should have you leave the animus.

 

[The_Scrivener]

Doom, Bioshock, Persona 3.

 

[the_great_cessation]

Beyond Good and Evil

You are an animal photographer living in a light-house with your adoptive uncle (who just happens to be a pig) and a group of orphans. Following an alien attack that threatens your home, you end up going an an epic globe trotting adcenture in which you your photography skills to uncover a government conspiracy that spans the entirety of the water-based planet of "Hyllis". All of this is accompanied by a general aesthetic that can be best described as Star Wars meets Zelda by the way of George Orwell and Jim Henson.

 

[Mangod]

You wake up in a morgue. Your skin is completely replaced with scar tissue, you have no memory of who you are, there's a talking skull hoverig over you, and you discover you've lost the ability to die.

Figure out why. And don't piss off the giant flying lady with the fancy hat.

Spoiler

Planescape: Torment

You are a recently created Vampire in L.A. None of the other Vampires like you, and your new boss seems to be actively trying to get you killed by sending you on suicide missions.

Survive. And try not to stab your new boss in the throat.

Spoiler

Vampire: the Masquerade - Bloodlines

 

[Drake the Dragonheart]

How has no one yet said battletoads? I mean play as one of three humanoid toads named after embarassing skin conditions: Rash, Zits, and Pimple where you beat down bad guys and finish foes off by have your fist or foot grow to enormous size as you deliver the finishing blow? Oh and they have levels where they ride hoverbikes!

Any mechwarrior or mech commander game: giant robotic war machines. need I say more?

 

[Godhead]

You wake up in a morgue. Your skin is completely replaced with scar tissue, you have no memory of who you are, there's a talking skull hoverig over you, and you discover you've lost the ability to die.

Figure out why. And don't piss off the giant flying lady with the fancy hat.

Spoiler: Uhh, chief?

OT: Build stuff, blow up, go to space, blow up in space. KSP.

Spoiler: RIP Jeb

 

[Rabbitboy]

Just Cause 2. You get dumped into a huge openworld with lots of stuf that needs blowing up and a hookshoot to steal the heilcopters the military sends after you.

 

[spiderzeter]

Dude, call of futy 12 cause it jas never been done b4 guys. Like, you shoot foreigners.
Mind blowing concept really. Such inovation.

Seriously though, the concept of throwing your arm that is holding a gun and still using that gun to shoot people is a cool idea. Execution wasnt gud but oh well.

 

[Mikejames]

Dreamfall's premise still resonates with me. A multiple point-of-view story that crosses paths with a burnt out college student stumbling onto a corporate conspiracy, an assassin driven by blind faith, and a rebel leader trying to find her place in an alternate reality.

I've always loved Psychonauts' premise: A summer camp for psychics.

Lots of good scenery and situations can come from a summer camp: woods, beaches, lakes, caves, campfires, etc. And of course lots of other good mechanics come from the idea of psychic powers being real: telekinesis, pyrokinesis, levitation, psybeams. Combine the two and you've got psychic scavenger hunts that require you to fly halfway across the map to retrieve the item, mutated lake monsters you can hear the thoughts of, and the ability to set squirrels and bears on fire WHENEVER YOU WANT. A perfect storm of nostalgic, fun settings with awesome powers and mechanics.

The campground atmosphere, the characters, the diverse mindscapes; everything in Psychonauts had so much personality. It's hard to not appreciate the bizarro setting.

 

[McMarbles]

You know what, I'm gonna change my answer to "Abraham Lincoln leads a brigade of steampunk heroes against Lovecraftian space aliens."

I never even thought it could exist, but now I NEED IT IN MY LIFE.

 

[RiseUp]

You play as a Soviet propaganda superhero who once fought to overthrow the Czar in the name of equality, now enslaved and put to work by Stalin, fighting both Nazis and political dissenters by beating the everloving crap out of them with a sledgehammer and throwing your fellow comrades at them like Pikmin. Can you overthrow your master in the name of the same values you fought for so long ago, and save the world from nuclear annihilation at the hands of a nation you created?

Red Menace. It's coming, one of these days...


Shameless plug aside, this sounds fantastic.

So basically you play as a bunch of hippie terrorists in a random American city, and you have to use any means at your disposal to turn the evil Arch Conservative tide and prevent the country from becoming a BACKWOODS YET CORPORATE NIGHTMARE! Or more likely, you go around dressed as a police officer stealing peoples' mobile phones and macaroni art, set up a huge prostitution ring, crash a van full of naked immigrants in a police chase, and then get executed on the spot by the Death Squad after being caught selling "magic" brownies.