Ask HN: Non-violent video games with great stories?

I hear you, it's not that I don't like combat games, it's just that they're overdone and the medium has so much potential. The story and atmosphere are usually what draw me into a game, and the gameplay mechanics are usually just a means to an end of progressing through the story.

I'm going to focus entirely on first person non-combat games because I prefer first person and it's more rare for them to be non-combat. First up are FP games with interesting game premises or mechanics:

The Occupation, absolutely zero other games like this. You are a journalist during a politically charged period in history, and you wander about beautifully crafted old institutional buildings in order to find documents and clues that you can use during your interviews with various people. The story you are putting together centres around a murder, but it's really a story about political manipulation, immigration and corruption in policymaking. Sounds a bit dry, but it is both relaxing and thrilling.

Hardspace: you're a ship-breaker in an orbital space ship breaking yard, and you float around using tools to slowly pull apart ships for scrapping. It's got a comical dystopian sense of humour and a decent story line.

INFRA: Absolute hidden gem. You are a structural engineer, sent out on an inspection job. As you follow the path of infrastructure degredation, a series of mishaps pull you deeper and deeper into the cities hidden infrastructure, through dams, power stations, water processing plants, steel mills or underground water infrastructure. The game has a good, dry sense of humor, and the story is good. Each location has some system or facility you can take the time to fix, or you can just keep moving through the story.

Jazzpunk: A spy game, but as if it were written by a 17 year old on mushrooms.

Outer Wilds, others have mentioned it, but you can't miss this one!

Portal 1, 2, though I suspect you would know of these already.

The Witness, a fantastic atmospheric exploration and world-puzzle game, I think watching a bit of it on YouTube probably shows it off well but it's just a great world to spend time in.

Event[0], your only friend is a well scripted space station AI, it uses a natural language typing interface and you have to talk to him while you wander around the station trying to figure out what happened and how to get back home.

The Stanley Parable, a very funny exploration of choice in videogames. I'm really underselling it.

Teardown, voxel based demolition game where you have puzzles and objectives to achieve with the tools and vehicles of construction and destruction at your fingertips.

Superliminal, a game where each object you grab changes in size to match the perspective of where you are looking. Great sense of humor as well.

Ah, interesting—it might have gone over my head as well. I did at least pick up that it was coping with loss, but I don't remember picking up any specifics beyond that. What did I miss? And does it involve picking up all of the collectables? I've tried repeatedly, but whenever I start playing, my kids want to play too, and inevitably restart the game.

I was surprised early on in the story—I expected it to be about helping these characters find peace before they move on, but so often they don't.

Depending on how old your kids are, text-based interactive fiction (that is, games in the style of 80s text-based games from Infocom and the like) could be fun and also educational. Thaumistry [1] is a particularly easy commercial game in that genre. When it comes to non-commercial IF, I particularly had fun with Counterfeit Monkey [2], and it has a good story IMO. There may be a little killing in both of these games; I don't remember for sure. But there certainly isn't copious violence as in an FPS.

[1]: http://www.thaumistry.com/

[2]: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=aearuuxv83plclpl

Maybe not the greatest story but definitely one of the loveliest games I've played was A Short Hike.

It is a kinda short (~5-6h) feel good game in which you more or less just have to explore a holiday island and meet different other Animals

The developer held a talk on the GDC how he made the game: https://youtu.be/ZW8gWgpptI8