Gaming

Cyberpunk 2077.

It's one thing to read a cyberpunk novel or watch a cyberpunk movie and "get" the moral of the story, which is usually "misuse of technology is bad".

But it's another thing to actually spend time in that world; to feel the effects of corporate corruption on your community, to experience the addiction to mind- and body-altering technologies, to watch loved ones - who you've spent hours looking directly in the eye and having conversations with - have their lives taken from them unfairly so that the richest person in the world can get 0.0001% richer.

I'd always been wary of techno-corpo bullshit. But that game instilled an all-new level of hatred in me; a hatred toward billionaires and megacorporations, toward oligarchs and aristocrats, toward those with the resources to change things for the better but too apathetic to stick their necks out.

Johnny Silverhand was right.

Outer Wilds. A game that genuinely made me reflect on my place in the universe.

dark souls 1. wife passed in that year and i just rolled through it completely distracting myself from reality and it helped a ton.

RDR2

Recently beat Portal (first one), for the first time. Please play if you haven't!!!

Bastion made me feel like that. I couldn't stop thinking about it for days.

Kerbal Space Program changed how I understand space flight.

Factorio changed how I approach programming

Modding original Doom and GTA vice city taught me 2d and 3d graphics as well as hacking and programming.

The Last of Us

It was 2013 and Zombie hype was peak. All my roommates gathered around the TV to watch me play a level each night. We would discuss what happened and our theories in between each play session. When those credits rolled we kept talking about it for weeks. Unforgettable.

Clair obscur had me feeling like this at the end of every Act.

Life is Strange - at multiple parts in fairness, but the ending in particular.

I chose the Bay ending and I still can't listen to Spanish Sahara without feeling like I've been booted in the balls. Masterful.

The pacifist route on Undertale is refreshingly wholesome and you just don't get that with many videos games.

Also, I loved Hi-fi Rush's music-based combat and fun characters.

I loved the world-building in Transistor. It felt like a more fleshed-out and artistic Tron setting.

Spec Ops: The Line. Probably kinda dated now but there were multiple moments in that game where I had to cool down after some heavy shit happens.

SOMA

Outer Wilds. Unfortunately I can't elaborate without spoiling it.

Night In The Woods. If you haven't played it, I'd recommend it. The characters are so well written, and some of the things they touch on hit me on a very, very personal level. And the music complements it all perfectly. It manages to have silly moments and serious moments with the same characters that all manage to fit and mesh together so well, and their relationships and lives all feel real and evolving throughout the story.

Outer wilds hit that spot for me

Braid.

I won't ruin it, but -- it is not the usual ending.

Mass Effect.

3’s ending didn’t quite stick the landing, on launch, but was fixed a few months down the line with the Extended Cut DLC.

1 and 2 were amazing. 1 especially had a great ending.

I actually found Lemmings to be a game that changed my life. I played it just before I became a professional programmer. Solving Lemmings puzzles is not exactly like programming, but it does teach you that there is a solution and if you just keep persistently trying different shit, you will eventually solve the problem. Also, it actually helps to be high as a kite all the time.

Dance Dance Revolution 3rd mix. It sounds stupid, I know, but hear me out. I really sucked at this game at first. My friends use to play every weekends at the arcade, so I really wanted to get better. So I really trained hard and became the best player in our group. People gattered around the arcade when I was playing. I was good enough for tournaments.

Now when I face something difficult, I'm confident I can overcome it if I really want to. I wasn't like that before. Thanks Konami.

Hacknet, Disco Elysium, Life Is Strange

Nothing has ever hit me harder than Disco Elysium, and I don't think anything else ever will. Everything from its themes of failure and depression and addiction and clinging to the past to its surprising message of hope in the face of unrelenting nihilism resonated with me on a molecular level. And the Final Dream is just the single most impactful, emotional and heart-rending moment I've had in any game ever. The culmination of the entire game distilled into one scene, and even the whole pathos of that one scene concentrated into three closing words:

Just some of them: Hollow Knight, Undertale, Ori and the Blind Forest, BioShock, Dead Space, Max Payne, Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee.

Undertale. That was the game that really changed my life. I never did complete the bad ending route because that game is my comfort game, and it made me want to be friends with the world. I was kind of a jerk in middle school and highschool, but Undertale, which I played in my Junior year made me feel so guilty about who I was being. I think it also saved me from going down the rightwing extremist pipeline because of how much it touched me. I thank Undertale for making my life better.

Deltarune also means so much to me.

Spiritfarer was one for me. Idk what it was about it, because the character development for the spirits you're carrying was pretty meh, and the twist at the end was ruined by the achievements early in the game, but that shit had me almost in tears when each person was dropped off at the gate.

Dark Souls.

I used to play mostly FPS. Now it's all soulslikes and practically nothing else.

World of Warcraft. I was really addicted to it for a few years but it really helped me get over a lot of the social anxiety issues that I had. I went from being really shy and barely interacting with other people in that game to being elected to take over a 60+ person guild by the time I was done with it. That confidence carried over into real life when I went back to school and began my career.

Homeworld. The end credits were so beautiful. It still gives me frisson thinking about it.

The Witcher 3! I never played 1 or 2. However 3 did a great job of story recap and finishing up said story. DLC was a must as well. All in all, I was engaged with the story.

And of course, RDR2.

Cyberpunk 2077. Only game that touched me that deep so far (though not many games I have played)

It was segmented so it wasn't really at the ending for battlefield one but the beginning that has fucked me up for a long time. The game opens to a black screen, utter silence, and a description prints out of how wide and brutal the first world world war was. The last text that appears on the screen was, "What you are about to experience is front line combat. You are not expected to survive."

What they were describing was that they didn't expect you to play one character and that you should be dying to respawn in a new section of the map with new features. This was the most accurate depiction of the war possible, even if it was just meant to describe the mechanics of the level. It went further! Every time you died they showed a real name of a real soldier that lost their life in the war and their birth and death date. Most of these ages are under the age of 24.

After the final death, it plays a cut scene where two soldiers are pointing rifles at each other and they both break down and chose not to kill each other....I believe all of this gameplay and the cut scene are being played off as a PTSD nightmare he's having while recovering in a hospital.....one of those 'stare at a blank wall and rethink how fucking good our lives are' moments. Also a deviation to the standard which is having a good guy-winner/bad guy-loser. They instead opted for the "we're all losing because of this" realization...I don't think we'll ever see anything like it again.

KOTOR

Obligatory HK-47 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XXvVVCr_6P8

Braid.

The game itself is brilliant. The story and message within is heartfelt, heartbreaking, and un-apologetically autobiographical. Up until that point, I knew gaming was a good storytelling medium, but not for something this moving.

Red Dead Redemption 2

I am an emotional person, and I regularly cry during movies, shows and books. But this is the first and only game to day, where I cried. I don't mean just teary-eyed, actually crying. And on more than one occasion.

It made me want to be a better person. Hopefully I am succeeding.

Cyberpunk 2077 is close second.

I didn't play Expedition 33 yet, but I saw the prologue and it was very emotional. There is a really good chance this game will be on my list too.

Nier: Automata, like the final ending. I've 100% this game three times and each time I end tearing up, thinking about a world where would could all come together and help eachother, then I look at the news and that dream is immediately shattered.

One that should get way more attention: Little King's Story. It presents as a cutsie Pikmin-like, but is actually a dark, metaphorical tale about abuse and trauma.

Most recently, the final choice in Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 gutted me.