This ranking covers three games that use branching narratives in less expected ways: Zero Parades: For Dead Spies, Slay the Princess, and The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy.
The choices in 2026’s open-world RPG The Blood of Dawnwalker prompted Polygon’s writer to reconsider what meaningful agency looks like. Discussion of Baldur’s Gate 3 often centered on its endings; earlier, debate around the Mass Effect trilogy focused on Mass Effect 3’s restrictive outcomes rather than the smaller changes carried across three games.
Big branches are satisfying because they give players influence over characters and events they care about. But Polygon’s writer argues that, much like video game romance, their familiar structure can become predictable. This ranking instead picks games that take branching narratives in less expected directions.
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3. Zero Parades: For Dead Spies
Release date: May 1, 2026. Available on Windows PC, with Nintendo Switch 2 and PlayStation 5 versions planned for November 2026.
Hershel used to be a spy. After a series of catastrophic incidents, she’s been decommissioned and finds herself in a room with a comatose person, unable to explain how she got there. In Zero Parades: For Dead Spies, your task is to unravel the dangerous events unfolding in the fictional town of Portofiro. Redemption might be possible, too. It isn’t guaranteed.
Choices shape more than Hershel’s story. They also shape how you act as her. Like its spiritual predecessor Disco Elysium, Zero Parades uses familiar CRPG skills such as persuasion and knowledge, but they do more than help you pick locks or lie your way through conversations.
Investing in certain social or mental skills improves your chances of passing conversation checks that reveal entirely different interpretations of what’s happening. Sometimes the reward is extra lore rather than a new route. Polygon’s writer argues that the writing makes these discoveries just as rewarding as finding another story branch, rather than leaving them feeling like a consolation prize.
Other conversations go considerably further. You can bond with a drunken businessman over a shared delusion about a goddess trampling you underfoot. Following that thought has a mechanical cost: max out your delusion stat and Hershel dies. Fatigue and anxiety can also become fatal when they reach their limits.
Balancing extreme decisions with calmer ones is therefore central to play. Yet the source describes the game’s response to your actions as a “yes, and” approach. Even a decision that seems disastrously wrong, or potentially fatal, nearly always leaves some way forward. It simply may not resemble the route you thought you were taking.
That uncertainty is the point. You’re judging a situation you don’t fully understand, making a call, and hoping it holds together. It brings your thinking closer to Hershel’s own predicament, rather than leaving you outside it as a player calmly selecting the best outcome.
For Polygon’s writer, that connection between decision-making and inhabiting a character is exceptional. Their comparison with Disco Elysium goes further: even that game, which they also consider excellent, doesn’t achieve quite the same effect.
2. Slay the Princess
Release date: Oct. 23, 2023. Available on PS4, PS5, Switch, Windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.
You’re a valiant warrior with an apparently straightforward assignment: enter a cabin, go into its basement, and kill the princess imprisoned there. The narrator insists she’s dangerous, a monster wearing the appearance of an innocent young woman. Whether you accept that account is another matter.
Slay the Princess grew out of the Black Tabby duo’s interest in testing the possibilities of choice-driven narratives. While developing the much larger Scarlet Hollow, they created something more contained and experimental. Its initial instructions are narrow; the possible responses aren’t. Refusing to enter the cabin at all opens an entirely new story branch.
Counting endings won’t tell you everything that matters here. The game’s many routes eventually lead to a fixed set of possible endings, but two routes arriving at the same outcome can reveal different things about the princess, your character, the situation, or some combination of all three.
That’s why Polygon’s writer sees it as succeeding both at branching outcomes and at the less easily counted changes along the way. The destination is only part of the story, and arguably not even the larger part. What you understand when you reach it matters just as much.
Your instincts guide your decisions, but those instincts are shaped by what previous interactions have taught you to believe. If the princess brutally murders you during one run, her claims of innocence may sound much less convincing next time. The choice isn’t simply whether someone should live or die. It’s whether you trust the person in front of you, and what evidence you’re willing to accept.
Polygon’s writer argues that this gives the branches an intensity that a straightforward survival-or-death decision tree couldn’t reproduce. A changed relationship to the princess can make a familiar decision feel different, even when it doesn’t produce a unique ending.
The writer also recommends Scarlet Hollow, Black Tabby’s horror visual novel with light RPG elements. It misses this ranking only because it remains unfinished after five substantial chapters. They praise its writing, unusual horror, art, and fresh approach to romance, making it a related recommendation rather than a fourth ranked entry.
1. The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy
Release date: April 24, 2025. Available on Switch and Windows PC.
The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy doesn’t give you an enormous number of decisions. It gives individual decisions enormous reach, sometimes with almost literally explosive results.
Its first 30 minutes establish a strange situation. Cuddly-looking but murderous monsters invade Tokyo, and a group of children are taken to an unusual school. The ghost-like figure who rescued them becomes both their headmaster and military commander. Instead of ordinary lessons, they receive blood magic that grants them superpowers to fight the invaders.
Then the game makes you follow a linear path for 30 hours. There are no branches, and the story appears to end. Only afterward does it return you to the beginning with the ability to change events.
The introduction of that freedom is deliberately dramatic. One action can alter the entire storyline, along with the lives and futures of everyone at the school. Those changes aren’t necessarily improvements. What initially looked like a fixed narrative becomes a story you can change without reliably predicting the consequences.
Developer Too Kyo Games takes that premise to extremes. Last Defense Academy has 100 endings, with none designated as canon. The absurd joke endings count just as much as the serious or traumatic ones. There’s even a whole tree of routes classified as the humor path, although Polygon’s writer notes that these comic detours sometimes outstay their welcome.
With that structure, the usual questions about who survives or whether an ending is happy stop being the main attraction. The stronger pull is wondering what could possibly happen next. You select the action, but you don’t control where it takes the story.
Polygon’s writer considers that combination radical: a single choice carries tremendous influence while the player loses much of the ability to steer its consequences. Agency here doesn’t mean mastery. The game lets you change things without promising that you can manage the result.
That ambition came at a cost. The source reports that the project almost bankrupted Too Kyo Games, and questions the wisdom of undertaking projects on this scale. Nevertheless, the writer’s verdict is strongly positive: overturning the expected relationship between player and game helped earn Last Defense Academy a place among Polygon’s favorite games of 2025. Its most consequential invitation isn’t to pick the ending you want, but to make a decision without knowing what kind of story will follow.
