Shadowing Practice: 10 Worst In-Game Decisions I Shouldn't Have Made - Learn English Speaking with Video

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Games are all about decisions.

You make them every moment, even when it doesn't seem like it.

Some are more obvious than others, and some have much bigger consequences. And...

Well, it's not always clear what you should and shouldn't do, but sometimes it is and you shouldn't.

It ain't personal.

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Today on Gameranx, the 10 worst decisions you should not have made in games.

Before we get started, we have done a list like this before.

It's quite a bit of fun.

It's actually been a couple of years since we've done it.

It was back in 2024.

We did Dragon's Dogma, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, Mass Effect, Alone in the Dark, Hitman 3, Witcher 3.

There was an Elden Ring one.

Go back to that one after this.

I wanna get things rolling though with number 10, kicking the squirrel in Baldur's Gate 3.

Near the elevator in Druid's Grove in Act 1 is a territorial little squirrel who will bite you

if you get too close.

The squirrel lunges at your foot and bites it.

For most players, your first instinct is to kick it.

No one likes getting bit by a squirrel, right?

They're supposed to be cute, supposed to be fuzzy, and that's supposed to be bitey.

If you succeed the dexterity skill check from kicking it, though, you don't just casually kick it.

You punt it directly into a nearby tree and kill it.

Ah, there is a lot of blood, too.

I thought kick meant like, Ah, get away!

I don't want no squirrel biting me!

But no, you kind of do an ultimate kick, explode it into red goo.

One of the earliest examples of the sort of overkill your character is capable of.

It's not one of those actions that's exclusive to the Dark Urge, either.

You don't need to be the serial killer character who has pathological urges to kill.

Anybody can turn this little squirrel into ludicrous gibbs with the power of their boot.

And it really all comes down to the animation.

It is over the top, finally.

In a way, I don't think you're going to anticipate.

It was a bunch of text saying you kicked it and it died like some other RPG.

I don't think people would really care, but because it's Baldur's Gate 3 and everything has a little bespoke animation,

This otherwise completely forgettable encounter becomes a traumatizing event where you, the player, inadvertently murder a cute little woodland creature.

The more humane option here is to study the squirrel's behavior

and use that to scare it or communicate with it in some way.

It actually gets you a reward.

Not a good one, but a reward.

It's everywhere.

You ruined a perfectly good snack.

At number nine, killing everybody on Paradise Island in the Outer Worlds 2.

Developer Obsidian loves a big world-changing moral dilemma.

This is essentially a repeat of New Vegas' Lonesome Road DLC, except instead of deciding where to launch some nukes,

you have to decide where the Vox relay will crash at the end of Paradise Island chapter.

The whys and hows of all this don't really matter that much.

What really matters is that this big thing is going to crash somewhere, and you've got to decide where.

There's three options.

Either it'll crash in a fairfield, the main town, in the area owned by the Antis Choice Corporation,

Westport, which is a protectorate city who you're basically, they're the default bad guys of the game, right?

Or if you're good at hacking, you can simply launch it into space and bypass any complex moral calculus.

But most players are not going to have Hack 4 by this point in the game.

So what you're really left with is two options and the most obvious choice is to blow up Westport, especially if you completed the early quest where you convince everyone in the town to move to Fairfield.

It's impossible to clear out Fairfield, but you can turn Westport into a ghost town, so blowing up Westport at that point is the obvious choice.

That way, no quest lines are failed and no potentially useful NPCs are killed.

At this point, the only reason to crash the relay into Fairfield is just to be cartoonishly evil.

The game lets you do it, of course, and yeah, if you do that, all but one NPC will be killed.

I begged you, Commander.

I begged you to direct the relay away from Fairfield.

Literally every single character set up in Paradise Island is now dead.

Your companion from Fairfield will hate you, and any benefits you could have obtained from the town are now gone.

You just made the game way harder for no reason other than to be a cackling supervillain.

It's so rare to see an RPG that just lets you do something so stupidly evil, and lets you wallow in the aftermath of the choice.

You're free to wander around the now completely destroyed Fairfield.

There's not much to find, because it's mostly just a burning crater.

But you can.

It's a choice that hurts you far more than it helps, of course.

So many RPGs force you into making decisions between two equally bad choices, but this freely gives you the opportunity to set up a correct choice

and completely ignore it just because you feel like it.

I wish more games gave you the opportunity to make pointlessly cruel choices.

Not necessarily because I want to make them, but because I think it just makes the game much more interesting.

You're sick.

Knew it was a mistake running with you.

I don't ever want to see you again.

And number eight is robbing Town Hall

and getting branded for it in Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 with

most open world games getting in trouble with the law is little more than a bit of a slap on the wrist.

Not even really that.

You get gunned down and then you respawn outside the police station with a few bucks missing from your wallet, but otherwise none the wiser.

Ready to continue whatever rampage you were in the middle of when the police so rudely interrupted.

This game, however, not so accommodating.

Law and Order and Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 is fairly complex, and there's a lot of different kinds of punishments, depending on the crime.

At the lowest end, you'll get thrown in the stocks for a few hours,

all the way up to a hanging in the town square.

One step below that is a criminal brand, brand, which you get for particularly heinous crimes that don't necessarily warrant instant death,

but the punishment is so bad that you'll practically wish you were dead afterwards.

Getting branded doesn't just hit you with a particularly painful-looking cutscene, it also makes the game harder for you going forward.

So early in the game, it's tempting to try and rob the town hall.

You start off effectively from square one, so getting a good chunk of cash is pretty essential, but if you get caught, and let's be clear, if you try to pull a heist that early in the game, you will get caught.

Then the value of the stuff you stole will far exceed your ability to pay back.

The punishment for trying to clear out the town coffers is branding, and it can be devastating.

A true setback for the unpaired.

You don't just take a massive reputation hit in town.

Your conspicuous rating also goes up a lot, so everyone's immediately suspicious of you, no matter what you do,

which makes trying to sneak around and steal anything a lot harder.

What's even worse is that as long as the brand fresh most local shopkeepers and services will refuse you.

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You can't get in a bed in the inn or trade for modest traders.

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Only people who will do business um with somebody of ill repute will do so like thieves and other lowlifes.

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Eventually the brand does wear off so you'll be able to start buying

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and selling from regular emergence again but the reputation it never goes away

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and earning it back can be difficult

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and expensive the debuffs associated with branding can be devastating income

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at least with hanging you can just load a game

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and be done with it with branding you might as well just load a game

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because the negative effects of it will haunt

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and frustrate you for the rest of the game going forward

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and number seven is uh ruling alone in mafia 3 the mafia series isn't really about choices

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but by the end of the third game you get get a few different options on how to wrap up the story.

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Your man Lincoln Clay can either leave town or gather his underbosses and choose to rule the city together.

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Or if you want to be really dark, you can kill them all and rule alone.

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Your three underbosses are no saints, but one of them was the protagonist of Mafia 2, and he's been nothing but a standup guy for the entire game.

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All three of them, for the most part, have had your back.

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So just choosing to execute them last minute, it's kind of nasty way to wrap things up.

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It ain't personal.

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What makes it a bad choice rather than just an evil choice is what happens next.

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You leave and you get back in your car and you hear a click.

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The car explodes, instantly killing Lincoln, and that's the end of the game.

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You get some talking heads afterwards to reveal that the kindly priest Father James was the one who planted the bomb, and well, it was because he couldn't accept how far your main man had fallen

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and felt like he had to put a stomp to him.

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All the other ends are relatively straightforward.

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You leave the city and disappear, or you rule the city as the next crime lord, but this one is the most surprising and visceral.

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The car bomb is just so sudden and out of nowhere.

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It's rare to see a main character in a game eat shit so suddenly and thoroughly.

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It's just about the most instantaneous reversal of fortune ever put into a game, instant karma.

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You do the bad thing and you die seconds later.

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It's not even necessarily a bad ending.

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As a wrap up to the mafia story, it's perfectly acceptable.

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These games are no stranger to killing their protagonists at the ending stretch, but man, is it a choice.

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It is the worst possible outcome.

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And number six is the test of faith in Gothic.

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This one's not quite as flashy as everything seen so far on the list, but this one is one of the more infamous choices in games.

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For so many players, they didn't even realize they were making a choice until it was too late.

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So in Gothic, your first major goal is to join one of the three camps, the old camp, the new camp, the swamp camp.

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To get initiated into one of these places, you need to perform multiple tasks for each location, do enough good deeds for them, and they'll eventually trust you enough to make you a full member of the group.

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Sounds straightforward, but these requirements for entry are strict, and it's possible, and even likely, you'll mess something up along the way

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and get stuck in a situation where one of the camps will just never let you in.

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Usually, it's by failing a certain quest, and in any of those situations, it's pretty obvious, at least, that you've screwed yourself, so just bite the bullet and reload your save.

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But in this really specific instance, It's possible to lock yourself out of entering the new camp before you even realize you can go to the new camp.

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Now, for many players, the new camp is gonna seem like the most sensible place to go.

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It's not run by greedy assholes.

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They actually have a reasonable plan for escaping the Valley of the Mines, and that makes them unlike everyone else.

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And the guards don't harass you constantly, try to extort money out of you.

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It's also not a confusing mess to navigate like the swamp camp, so the new camp is clearly the most sensible place to go.

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The only problem is

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that this quest called test of faith where you're meant to

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deliver some information from the mine back to the old camp

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uh it's simple it's a straightforward little mission you bring it

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to me then we bring them their stuff for the next

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convoy sounds simple enough it is as long as you make

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sure the new campers don't get their hands on it

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but what makes it complicated is that

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if you want to join the new camp you're supposed to steal this information

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and give it to them instead in hindsight it's kind of

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pretty obvious i mean the mission is called the test of faith after all

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but the problem here is is that you can do the mission before you even know where the new camp is,

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a quest where a guy guides you to the new camp that happens after this mission.

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So you can easily lock yourself out of joining the new camp before you even go here.

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You can spend hours and hours doing every little mission at the new camp to get them to like you, but when you ask them to join, they'll always say it's not enough.

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All you get is a vague clue that they want you to steal something important from the old camp.

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You might assume that they mean you're supposed to rob the castle or something, but no, the only thing that actually counts is this document from test of faith, and if you have completed that quest,

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you're dead in the water.

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Obviously, you can still join the other two camps, but it still sucks to get blindsided by this whole thing, especially if you're dead set on joining the new camp.

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Mostly this game is tough but fair.

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It's old school in a good way, but this whole scenario is one of the rare few bits of bad old school design.

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It's way too easy to lock yourself out of joining the new camp on your first playthrough.

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At number five is Offering the Guinea Pig in Look Outside.

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This is a game that goes to great lengths to let the player make some very bad decisions.

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The entire game is building towards the final ritual where you need to make four offers.

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These can either be the correct ones, the incorrect ones, or in this case, an extremely incorrect one.

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To make a very long story short, in Look Outside, an eldritch being known as the Visitor is above Earth,

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and anyone who looks at it becomes cursed and transforms into a horrible, twisting, gibbering monstrosity.

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Its presence is bringing about the apocalypse, and the ritual is meant to communicate with it and make it go away to save what's left of humanity.

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The problem is they left an idiot like your main guy to gather all the necessary items for the ritual, And if you just so happen to offer three correct items,

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but screw up with the VHS, then you might be inclined to give them this guinea pig named Cinnamon instead.

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The offerings are all meant to be depictions of the visitor or things that have seen it.

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So the idea here is that maybe the guinea pig did see it.

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You do find it in the security office, which has a camera outside.

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In any other scenario, this would just lead to a standard bad ending, but for whatever reason, they decided to make this entire alternative ending to the game if you offer the guinea pig.

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In the end, it horribly transforms and absorbs all the cultists, forcing you to fight it as the god-rat Xenamun.

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You know, cinnamon.

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It's a really tough fight, and losing it gets you a particularly nightmarish ending where you're

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consumed by the hell guinea pig's flesh to suffer eternal torment

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as its gigantic form ravages through the land like an especially ugly kaiju.

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But there is actually a worse decision you can make here and that's try to win.

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If you beat it, it's more trouble than it's worth first, but it will give you a somehow actually worse ending.

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Of course, this is the kind of game where putting in more effort and succeeding often gets you a worse outcome.

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If you win the fight, then it's revealed the cultists were actually holding this thing's power back

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and you killing them as part of the boss fight only made it stronger.

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It absorbs your dumb ass once again and covers the entire earth in mutant rodent flesh.

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All life on earth is eradicated because of this one stupid creature, and it is all your fault.

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At number four is mixing sleeping pills and alcohol in Indigo Prophecy, known as Fahrenheit outside the States.

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It's a bad choice in life and in the game.

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In one of the earliest chapters of the game, your main man wakes up in his apartment after the opening

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crime scene where your guy murders a man for mysterious supernatural reasons.

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You're on the run from the lie and you're freaking out.

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And one of the game's many oddball mechanics is that your mental state drops too low and you'll die.

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So you need to cheer yourself up and fast.

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One of the first things you can find nearby is a bottle of sleeping pills.

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These calm your nerves, but your guy makes sure to mention

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that the bottle warns you not to mix them with alcohol consumption.

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And they mean it because if you head over to your pantry

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and dig out a bottle of brown liquid and slurp it down, you will, no joke, immediately keel over and die.

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And that's the end of my story and I mixed alcohol and medication.

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I lost consciousness.

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I mean, that's a possible outcome of doing it in real life, but you generally don't just freaking die.

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Like, mixing Ambien in a Tall Boy isn't good, but it is not a deadly poison that will kill you within seconds of drinking it.

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That's not how it works, David Cage.

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It's not, like, good or fun,

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if anyone's curious, but it's also not quite like swallowing an instant death pill in Metal Gear Solid.

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At number three is the Blood on the Ice quest in Skyrim.

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One of the buggiest quests in all of Skyrim.

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Has so many ways to break it beforehand that it's almost impossible to keep track.

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It's why most people either don't bother with the quest or just use console commands to skip it.

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But the second option is, of course, not possible on console, ironically enough.

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So you're kind of screwed no matter what you do.

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Just starting the Blood on the Ice quest can be tricky.

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It only triggers after you visited Windhelm multiple times, and the triggers can be confusing and inconsistent.

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Sometimes leaving and returning three times is enough.

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Sometimes you need to go back and forth more often, but sometimes doing it too much just breaks the quest.

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If you want to help, ask some of these gawkers if they saw anything useful.

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I'm going to examine the body before the rats can get to it.

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Without the unofficial patch installed, it may be easier to break it than do it correctly.

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I managed to break it twice in two completely unrelated ways.

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I wasn't even trying to fail the quest, I was trying to complete it.

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One of the most absurd ways to mess it up is by joining the Dark Brotherhood before doing it.

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You eventually get a mission with a bonus objective to kill a certain character who just

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so happens to be related to someone involved in Blood on the Ice.

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Of course, most players wouldn't realize the connection or assume that it doesn't matter, because why would it?

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But if you do kill the target in Windhoft, then the mother will die as well, and that breaks the quest.

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It's another situation where you can break a quest long before you even know it's available, but this situation is worse because Skyrim is a far more open game than Gothic.

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There are a lot of other quests and characters

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and locations to explore that rarely connect with each other in any meaningful way, but this quest is kind of the perfect storm of janky interactions

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and far-reaching consequences for what you do that don't seem to matter, but really do.

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Ultimately, it's just one broken quest, but if you wanted to get that Wilhelm house for yourself, then watch out for Blood on the Water.

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It's a mess and still hasn't been fixed for 15 years and counting.

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The only unusual thing is the shape of the cuts.

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They look like they were made with, well, the ancient Nords used these kinds of curved blades when they embalm their dead.

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At number two is the Demon Path in Soul Nomad and the World Eaters, going back to 2007 with what may be the original Genocide Route.

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The Demon Path is an alternative path through the game

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that lets you embrace your inner demon instead of trying to suppress it.

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It's only possible to play if you start a new Game Plus

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and then choose the most evil options at the start of the game.

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Not clear for around half an hour, if anything, that what you're doing is actually changing what's happening in the game.

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But the important thing is to see the dialogue option that's just dot dot dot and has a skull beside it.

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And that's how you start the demon path.

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Like the name implies, you just go straight up full demon, killing everything in your way.

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This includes your cliched childhood friend who, on a normal playthrough, follows you through the entire game, but here barely gets a few lines before you ruthlessly slaughter him.

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By the end, a coalition of all the heroes and villains team up to try to take you down.

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Honestly, a little dramatic in the end, despite the cheap production values.

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Everyone is working together and desperately trying to fight an impossible battle against your ridiculously overpowered bad guy, and nobody stands a chance.

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Everyone you knew, all the goofy characters from the main game, they're just obstacles standing in your way, and it manages to be legitimately grim.

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Taking the evil route sounds fun, but this game also does make it pretty depressingly bleak.

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As a choice, it's certainly an interesting one.

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It completely changes the direction of the story.

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You essentially get to speedrun the game, and it wraps up after only a few battles, but the whole thing is incredibly bleak, and it's not even that much fun.

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It's a turn-based strategy game.

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You have to fight dozens of guys with one single overpowered unit, and it takes for freaking ever.

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It is a slog.

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I thought being evil was supposed to be entertaining, but here it's really not it's pretty boring in Soul Nomad and the World Eaters.

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And finally, at number one, Seeking Mr. Eaton's Name in Fallen London.

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In the past, we've talked about absurdly self-destructive choices you can make in the Sunless Sea, but now it's time to finally point the spotlight towards the original

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and maybe the most infamous self-destructive story path in this series or really in any video game series I'm aware of.

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There are a few games about seeking the truth or some unknown answer that inevitably leads to madness and destruction.

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Games like Bloodborne are capable of turning the players into the same obsessive lunatics to fill out the game world.

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Yes, there's no reason why you're doing patently insane stuff like eating the umbilical cord of an alien baby, but you, the player, have to go deeper.

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You have to see what's on the other side, despite the fact that it will almost certainly make things harder for you and ultimately lead to a bad ending.

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Seeking Mr. Eaton's name is like that times infinity.

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Impossibly complex, extremely long, takes a ton of time and resources to progress through, and along the way, it's constantly messing up your character, making you weaker, permanently cursing them,

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and making the game harder, and eventually, by the end, makes your account unusable.

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All the while, the game is explicitly telling you to stop as well.

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Even attempting to start the questline gets you this message, do not do this.

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The storyline will leave you forlorn and unsatisfied.

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You will probably fail, and in the event that you succeed, you will regret your success.

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They're not kidding either.

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The quest line is very easy to fail.

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Success gives you nothing and loses everything, and yet you're a true video game explorer, so you'll be compelled to see this thing through no matter what, won't you?

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The warnings only make you more curious.

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It's the forbidden nature of the story that makes it so much more compelling, and the people behind Fallen London know that.

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These guys know exactly what they're doing by laying the warning messages on so thick.

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They know the dedicated nutjobs out there will, they will do nothing if not try to solve the most frustratingly pointless challenges.

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And even if they get nothing in return, which you don't, like you're really getting nothing here.

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The game is just text on a webpage.

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So all you're left with is your imagination and it's an extremely long, convoluted and almost impossible to complete quest line that does nothing but ruin your character.

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In fact, as I said, eventually makes your character unusable, Intentionally choosing to go down this route is a terrible idea in every respect, and yet people do it.

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It's the ultimate form of reverse psychology if someone tells you not to do something in a game, no matter how stupid or pointless your gamer brain tells you to do it.

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So, in that vein, do not leave us a comment and let us know what you think.

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If you liked this video, click like.

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444 sentences

Who Is This Video For?

This video is perfect for intermediate English learners aiming to boost their conversational skills, especially for IELTS speaking practice. The casual, storytelling tone mirrors real-life discussions, making it ideal for shadow speech—repeating phrases aloud to mimic rhythm and intonation. Whether you’re a gamer or not, the narrative structure (list format, personal anecdotes) helps with understanding natural flow, a key skill for exams and daily communication.

Words & Idioms Worth Stealing

"ludicrous gibbs": Over-the-top, messy destruction (e.g., "The storm turned the beach into ludicrous gibbs").
"bespoke animation": Custom-made, unique visuals (e.g., "The designer created a bespoke animation for the ad").
"moral dilemma": A choice between right and wrong (e.g., "Choosing between work and family is a common moral dilemma").
"over the top": Exaggerated (e.g., "Her birthday party was so over the top with fireworks and a live band").

These phrases add color to speech, crucial for scoring high in IELTS speaking where vocabulary range is assessed.

How to Get the Accent Right

The speaker uses a relaxed, American English accent with natural pauses and emphasis. For shadow speak practice, focus on: - Reduction of "it's": Notice how "it's not always clear" becomes "it ain't always clear" (casual contraction). - Stress on key words: In "kicking the squirrel in Baldur's Gate 3," "kicking" and "squirrel" are emphasized to highlight the action. - Intonation in storytelling: The rise in pitch when saying "Ah, there is a lot of blood, too" builds drama—mimic this to sound engaging. Practice daily by pausing the video, repeating lines, and recording yourself to compare. This method, often called shadowspeaks, trains your mouth to move like a native.

Learning English with YouTube videos like this bridges entertainment and skill-building, making practice feel less like work and more like fun.

Grammar in this video

The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:

Structure	In the video
Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it	are failed · will be killed · be done
Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now	have done · It's actually been · have had
Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing	Westport, which is · people who will · one who planted

What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

Shadowing technique: read the full step-by-step guide →

Shadowing Practice: 10 Worst In-Game Decisions I Shouldn't Have Made - Learn English Speaking with Video

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Who Is This Video For?

Words & Idioms Worth Stealing

How to Get the Accent Right

Grammar in this video

What is the Shadowing Technique?