Warning: all of those games contain stuff that can fuck you up if you’re not expecting them, so check trigger warnings as required. That said, I’d also add OMORI and Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass to the list - IMO they are much better than OFF as both games and stories while playing with similar themes.

Counterpoint: All the origin characters have bespoke side stories and dialogue, and one of them is a chaotic neutral rogue who is also a bisexual vampire twink.

(Given Sven’s advice here I’m probably just going to go with a drow or tiefling warlock, but Astarion is absolutely on the table for the second playthrough.)

By being the brains behind the Republican party, he has done more to endanger the entire world via climate change than almost any other living person. That’s leaving aside the destruction of democracy in America and all the many, many, many individual ruined lives. He is quite literally multiple orders of magnitude more evil than the worst serial killer in history, and when he dies I will hold a massive party in which the house toilet is decorated to resemble his grave.

I’d say start with Wrath and don’t bother with Kingmaker. Wrath is just much more interesting both as a game and as a concept, and there’s no shortage of replayability there - the amount of variability between paths is crazy. That said, whichever game you start with, I’d strongly recommend you download a mod to trivialise the management minigame (kingdom management for Kingmaker, crusade management for Wrath). They’re a) not fun, b) difficult (and unlike the rest of the game have no difficulty settings), c) have nothing to do with the core RPG gameplay, and d) can brick your campaign if you screw them up.

Also, you know about Baldur’s Gate 3, right? It’s coming out in two weeks after a very long and successful early access period and it very much looks like all the crazy reactivity of Wrath on a full AA budget.

I mean, let’s not forget the whole sex predator thing. Their image is going to be faeces smeared on a bathroom wall until Guillemot goes.

Quite a boring answer from me:

• Steam deck, which gives access to a large subset of PC games and also just about every console up to the PS2/Gamecube/Xbox era plus the Wii via emulation (no jailbreaking required).
• Switch, which gives access to a lot of the best WiiU games as expanded ports plus some spruced up versions of Nintendo’s back catalogue.
• PS5, which gives access to most of the best PS3 and PS4 games via PS+.
• Xbox Series S/X, which has backwards compatibility with the Xbox One and Xbox 360 for some (most?) games.

There will be some slight gaps in backwards compatibility/emulator compatibility for some games, but I suspect the biggest remaining gap will be PC games not capable of running on the Steam deck.

Have you tried Shelter 2? It’s not quite the same thing, but you play a lynx with five adorable cubs trying to survive in a wilderness setting. (Warning: your playthrough will likely involve some or all of your adorable cubs dying.)