Someone who remembers
I've been writing a companion this year. That's a character who travels with the player, comments on things, has opinions about the player's choices and a story of their own that unfolds along the way. I can't say much more about them. I can say they're the most work I've ever put into one person, and the work is mostly in one thing: they remember.
Not everything. That would be impossible, and it would also be a little frightening. But they remember the things a friend would. Who you spared. Who you didn't. What you said to them three towns ago when they asked you a hard question and you made a joke instead. Hours later, at a fire somewhere, they bring it up. Not to judge you. Just to show that it landed somewhere.
From the writing side, this is mostly bookkeeping. A long list of things the game notices, and a much longer list of lines for each of them, most of which any given player will never hear. I spend whole days writing reactions to choices I'd guess one player in ten makes. It's unglamorous, and it's the best part of the job I have right now.
What I didn't expect was what it does to people. We ran a playtest last month, and I watched one player (through glass, with his permission) reach a scene where the companion brings up something he'd done near the start, almost in passing. He stopped playing. He took his hands off the controller and sat back. Then he leaned in to the microphone on the desk and said, quite clearly, "Sorry," to a character on a screen. Nobody had asked him to. There's no option for it.
Afterward he said he'd forgotten he'd done it, and the character hadn't, and that made it feel as if it had really happened. I've thought about that sentence every day since.
I think being remembered is one of the things we want most and get least. A game can give someone that cheaply, with a list and some lines. I'm not sure what I think about that yet, except that it works far better than it should, and that I'm the one keeping the list.
Has a game, or a book, or a person, ever brought up something you'd forgotten you did?