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Harm Other is the ultimate in videogame morality plays

Do no harm. Or the other thing.

A starving puppy crosses your path. Do you:
1. Make it a home-cooked dinner [+5 Hero Points]
2. Make it into a home-cooked dinner [+5 Jerk Points]

It's a conundrum we've all faced before. Harm Other - from Something Awful gaming writer turned silly game-maker Dennis Farrell - takes the trope to its most (il)logical extremes. Right now it just exists as a cute little playable proof-of-concept, but a commercial version has been fully crowdfunded, so give it a look, if you want a quick chuckle to end the day on.

The proof-of-concept demo is admittedly a little on the lightweight side (amounting to maybe 5% of the final word-count or less), but it already contains some clever silliness and a few good laughs. The full game promises significantly more branching despite the limitations of a two-button interface as well.

Sometimes, it's nice to have a game entirely dedicated to telling a single joke very well, or at least so exhaustively that you cannot ever imagine hearing another permutation of it as long as you live. Plus, as RPS's resident Doom guru, I can't help but smirk at the chapter titles:

Considering that Dennis has been writing silly things about games for a very long time now, it seems safe to assume that he'll have no problem writing enough silly words to fill a game with. He reckons that by December of this year, every moral quandary in the history of the medium will have been boiled down to a binary decision, free for you to make at your leisure.

Throwing $5 at the Kickstarter will get you a copy of Harm Other when it's finished, and $1,401 will give you very slight bragging rights over anyone paying $1,400, plus a copy of the game.

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Dominic Tarason avatar
Dominic Tarason: A freelance games critic, Dominic was a regular contributor to Rock Paper Shotgun from 2015 until 2020. In that time he wrote the site's mods column, Modder Superior, as well as flexing his indie game, first-person shooter and Path Of Exile expertise while covering PC gaming news in the evenings. He has also contributed to PC Gamer.
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