Polygon has published a retrospective on what it calls Mass Effect's cruelest moral choice: the Homecoming side quest from the original 2007 game, still haunting players 19 years later.

The setup is brutally simple. A grieving widower, Samesh Bhatia, asks Commander Shepard to recover his wife's body so she can be laid to rest. The Alliance wants to keep the body for research. The player has to pick — hand a husband his wife's remains, or deny him for the sake of military science that might save others.

Polygon's argument is that neither ending feels clean, which is precisely why the quest endures. Unlike the series' flashier galaxy-scale decisions, Homecoming is small, personal and unglamorous — there's no renegade swagger or paragon halo that makes the choice comfortable. The piece does land on a position, arguing one of the two outcomes is ultimately better, but the point is that the game makes you sit with the cost either way.

It's a timely revisit as BioWare's legacy gets re-examined and the original trilogy's writing continues to outshine most modern attempts at video game moral dilemmas. Nearly two decades on, a five-minute side quest about one dead soldier remains the series' most effective piece of ethical design.