With the last round of "empathy games" (early 2010's stuff like Cart Life or Depression Quest, all of which got some play in academic game studies) one of the major objections that came up was that the player of such games may not carry this forward into any positive action their lives, but rather see themselves like the viewer of a TV sitcom, aggressively making things worse for their character for the sake of being a troll: "sucks to be poor, lol".
If there's a correct way to produce an empathy response, it appears to be Undertale's model, in which the player spends most of the game thinking that they are beating the game by killing monsters and ignoring the signs that they actually made an ethical choice until it's too late, further hammered in by an extra layer of permanence in the game's save system taunting them for what they did.
The downside is that this seems to mostly be a shame response, not a guilt response. Much of the resulting fandom casually overlooked the darker elements of the characters you're sparing, which are mostly revealed in postgame content. That is, the ethical behaviors are produced by manufacturing an attachment to the fictional universe, not by developing the player's philosophy of action.
If you want to take on this type of game, addressing the player attachments is priority one. Otherwise they disengage with the content and aim just to break the game systems instead.