Games

Horizon: Zero Dawn. Such a haunting, beautiful story.

SOMA still lives in my brain 10 years later.

CrossCode. I won't spoil anything, but Lea very quickly cemented herself as my favorite protagonist of all time.

Recent hit in this regard is Clair Obscure: Expedition 33. Incredible writing and incredible game overall.

Final Fantasy XV... Usually I get wet eyes when the games do it right. But with FF15 I literally cried.

This may seem like a cheeky answer, but Limbo.

Sometimes it's not about what you say, it's about what you don't.

Seconding Spiritfarer.

I also became entirely entranced by Horizon: Forbidden West. A death in that game hit me unexpectedly hard, and I had to take a couple days off from playing it to kind of deal with the grief. I tried the first Horizon, but I feel it didn't get anywhere close to the depth in worldbuilding and character development of the second game

Life is Strange
Spiritfarer
Titanfall 2
Hellblade
Red Dead 2
Hades
Oxenfree

Many more, but these stood out on actually caring about the characters and what happened to them.

Disco Elysium is, without a doubt, the best written game I've ever played. That game had me experience the entire rainbow of emotions.

A Way Out. Highly recommend playing it with your closest friend. Fucking game made me feel stronger emotions than any other game I've ever played, because the motherfucker I was playing with is my best friend. I'm not going to spoil the ending, I'm just going to say: heavy fucking feelings

Thats a bit of a weird way of saying that, but I get what you mean.

For me, it has to be A Girl Who Chants Love at the Bound of This World YU-NO. The original PC-98 release.

Be warned, the game has very explicitly drawn and described sex scenes, some of which I found extremely disgusting, personally, but I understand it is a game from a totally different time and culture and I am not here to police any of that. Fortunately, I learned pretty early on that none of those scenes contain anything actually relevant to the story of the game, so I could just quickly click through them until the picture changed. Fair warning, if you aren't the kind of person that can overlook this, then you will probably only be focusing on the like, two parts that amount to maybe 5% of the whole game. But its pretty bad, at least in my opinion.

YU-NO took me no joke 80+ hours to beat, on a blind first playthrough. The story is about time travel, and features a very complex branching story, especially for the time the game came out. It has like 9 different endings. Basically the main character is trying to travel through time to find his father, who was a historian that disappeared one day. You get a device in a package from your father that basically acts like a Quick Save for the various timelines in the game that get created by the choices you make as a player. If you give or don't give a certain item to a certain character at a certain time, that could have consequences that put you onto a different timeline, and if you need to get to a different one then you can Quick Load back to a point you used a jewel at. As you go through each timeline, you pick up jewels that act as more Quick Save points in the story. You have to collect all the jewels to get the True Ending of the game, which literally is just a sequel game. The Epilogue of YU-NO is so fire I almost wish it was its own game, YU-NO 2. It was a twist I was not expecting, but loved.

Needless to say, that game had me hooked. And while there were a few parts that were beyond my own personal opinion of redemption, I am glad I could look past those parts to see the rest of the game. There was a remake in 2017 that IMO totally destroyed the art of the original game, which was unfortunate, but I also don't think it even censored or removed the sex scenes, so I couldn't even be happy about that. Its just an all around downgrade except that it is easier to get that in English since it is on Switch, Steam, and PS4.

Rime is a fun but emotional one.

Citizen Sleeper isn't my usual type of game but I was hooked instantly by it all.

Legend of Mana

Spiritfarer did this to me, I was very much invested in every character (except the bird and the bull, they can fuck off)

The quarry, and until dawn were pretty good. A bit lacking in gameplay, but awesome stories.

Witcher 3 tells many stories that contribute to an overarching story.

Fallout new Vegas does it with the option of murder hoboing

Bg3 is pretty good story wise too ❤️

I'll say the obligatory Red Dead Redemption. What a ride. From beginning to end. It legitimately feels like an "epic" where the character and world develop.

As you get to the end of the game and you're in the more populated areas that feel like they have left the wild West behind and the parallel with the story... it's great.