For all the completely justified grief I give the Bioware premium module Kingmaker (for Neverwinter Nights) thanks to the bad game design bugbears of "hidden triggers that force me, the player who is busy enjoying your game, to suddenly stop playing it and have quite possibly almost the entirety of the content closed off unless I find ways to tap-dance around them", the opening of that module was brilliant. You start off in medias res with a eclectic team of individuals (a scarred nymph, a renegade rakshasa, a were-rat, and one of those dwarves from the elemental plane of fire whose hair is made of fire), and then through a brief contrived sequence of events, all of you die.
But worry not! You're given the ability to resurrect yourself, and two companions of your choice. At that point your emotional investment in this cast of characters is all but nonexistent, as you don't really know them yet, all your interactions were off-screen, so what the game does to make you care about this choice is brilliant: You don't simply walk around, talk to all 4 of them, learn a bit of back-story, and then pick the ones you want to keep.
No, see, in order to resurrect the two companions you want to take with you, you have to tell the ones you aren't going to resurrect that you're condemning them to permanent death and then watch as they are dragged off screaming/cursing/numbly resigning themselves to their fate as the ominous reapers walking the battlefield your corporeal shell is currently having a vigorous "lie down on" pull them into the afterlife - if you don't do that first, you can't resurrect anyone because your magic sword/guardian angel thingie doesn't have a "charge".
Forcing the player to kill people you've just met who are ostensibly your friends and tell you as such, pleadingly, as they try to convince you that you should totally not condemn them to death and let them come back to life to help you, well that's the sort of decision that makes me hate myself and this was right at the bloody beginning. Such a shame the designers screwed things up later on with those asinine triggers that prevent players from actually seeing all the rest of their writing and quest design, grah.