Realism in video games is a double-edged sword. It can pull you deeper into a world, making every action feel weighty and consequential. It can also turn a fun experience into a tedious slog that has you questioning why you play games in the first place.
Some devs are so committed to simulating reality that they forget a crucial detail: reality isn’t always fun. When you have to worry about broken legs, speed limits, and empty stomachs in a video game, something has gone slightly sideways. These are fantastic games, but they came dangerously close to ruining themselves with their devotion to the real.
8
Kingdom Come: Deliverance – Fall Damage
Kingdom Come: Deliverance wants you to feel like a medieval peasant, and it succeeds perhaps a little too well. The game’s fall damage system is so punishing that hopping off a small ledge can leave Henry hobbling around with broken legs. In a game already demanding patience with its historically grounded combat and survival systems, the prospect of crippling yourself by misjudging a gentle slope adds a layer of anxiety that no one asked for.
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Exploration, which should be one of the game’s greatest joys, becomes a nerve-wracking exercise in scanning every hill for a safe path down. Most games let you leap off a roof and roll away unscathed. Kingdom Come lets you step off a porch and schedule a trip to the bathhouse.
7
Red Dead Redemption 2 – Looting And Skinning Animations
Red Dead Redemption 2 is a masterpiece of world-building, but Rockstar’s insistence on showing every single animation in full can test anyone’s patience. Looting a body means watching Arthur methodically search each pocket. Skinning an animal means watching the entire grim process unfold in loving detail.
Individually, these animations are impressive feats of motion capture. After the fiftieth time, they become a slow-motion barrier between you and actually playing the game. It extends to everything – picking up items, opening drawers, browsing through a catalogue. The realism is undeniable, but so is the feeling of being held hostage by Arthur’s refusal to hurry up.
6
Mafia 2 – Speed Limits
Mafia 2 gives you a gorgeous open-world recreation of a 1940s American city and then politely asks you not to enjoy it too quickly. The police will pull you over for speeding, which means you spend a surprising amount of your time as a hardened criminal dutifully obeying traffic laws.
There’s a speed limiter button to help you stay legal, but the fact that it exists at all tells you something about the design philosophy at work. Cruising at a historically accurate pace through Empire Bay is atmospheric for about five minutes before it starts feeling like a driving test. It turns what should be exciting getaways into leisurely Sunday drives.
5
The Long Dark – Calorie Management
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The Long Dark is a gorgeous and harrowing survival experience set in the frozen Canadian wilderness, and it is absolutely obsessed with making sure you know how many calories you’re burning. Everything costs energy – walking, climbing, carrying gear, even sleeping burns through your reserves. The game tracks your caloric intake with an almost clinical precision, and if you fall into a deficit, your condition deteriorates fast.
It creates a compellingly bleak loop of scavenging and rationing, but it also means you can starve to death remarkably quickly despite having just eaten a full meal of venison. You survived a wolf attack and a blizzard, but it’s the mathematics of thermodynamics that finally does you in. For a game about the romance of wilderness survival, it can feel uncomfortably like counting macros on a diet app.
Metal Gear Solid 3 brought survival mechanics to the stealth genre, requiring players to hunt for food and manually treat every wound Snake sustains. Get shot? Pause the game, open the menu, dig out the bullet, disinfect the wound, apply a bandage, and stitch it closed.
It’s an incredibly detailed system that makes you appreciate the physical toll of espionage, but it also means that intense firefights are regularly interrupted by what amounts to a first-aid paperwork simulator.
The stamina system compounds this, with Snake’s grumbling stomach becoming a more persistent antagonist than any Metal Gear. You can eat almost anything you find in the jungle, which is a nice touch until you accidentally poison yourself with a bad mushroom.
3
The Sims – Needs Management
The Sims has always been about managing virtual lives, but the constant demand to keep your Sims fed, rested, entertained, and hygienic can feel less like playing God and more like working a shift at a daycare.
You want your Sim to pursue a career in art? Too bad – they need to use the bathroom, eat breakfast, and take a shower first, and by then it’s time for work. The needs decay system is faithful to real human biology, and that’s precisely the problem.
Nobody boots up a life simulation to watch someone eat cereal for twenty minutes. You came here to build a dream house and start a drama-filled neighbourhood, not to babysit an adult who can’t remember to feed themselves.
2
Baldur’s Gate 3 – Encumbrance
Baldur’s Gate 3 is one of the finest RPGs ever made, which makes it all the more baffling that it wants you to spend so much time managing the weight of your backpack. Larian faithfully adapted Dungeons & Dragons’ carrying capacity rules, meaning every sword, potion, and hunk of camp supplies has weight that counts toward your limit.
Exceed it and your character slows to a miserable crawl, unable to jump or move effectively in combat. In a game overflowing with loot and discoverable items, this turns every dungeon haul into an agonizing round of inventory triage. You’ve just slain a dragon and claimed its hoard, but now you need to stand there deciding which pile of gold is too heavy to carry. The system is faithful to the tabletop, but at a real table you have a DM who handwaves this sort of thing. No such luck in Faerun.
1
Microsoft Flight Simulator – Everything
Microsoft Flight Simulator is perhaps the purest expression of realism in gaming, and it earns the top spot because it is, by design, completely unwilling to compromise. Every switch in the cockpit does something. Takeoff checklists can run to dozens of steps. Navigation requires understanding real aviation instruments and procedures.
The game simulates the entire planet using satellite data, real-time weather, and live air traffic, and it expects you to treat it with the same seriousness a real pilot would. It is breathtaking, technologically miraculous, and for anyone expecting to just hop in a plane and fly around, it is approximately as accessible as actual flight school. There are assist modes, of course, but even those assume a baseline familiarity with aviation that most people simply don’t have. The realism isn’t a flaw – it is the game – but it has surely sent thousands of players running back to Ace Combat.
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