Gaming

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.

Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic (the first one). This one was my complete entrance to the RPG games and i was so soaked into the atmosphere and the characters. And well of course Witcher 3. For me the best game ever. Setting, characters, story, choises…

RDR2

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.

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.

Fallout 3

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

Desperados 3 did it for me. The game ends right where it promised, getting revenge and jumping to black as soon as the trigger's pulled. Knowing something like this will likely never be made again drove me into a light melancholy.

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 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.

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.

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

Omori, not much to add, it was the first game to give me goosebumps, or only game so far, and truly feel sad

I'm going way back, almost 30 years.

Phantasmagoria 2: The Puzzle of Flesh

Assuming I remember correctly, some ways into the game, you, the player, realizes your character is the one who has been committing all the horrible, tortures and murders. I stopped playing at that point. I never play "evil". For instance, in FO4, I never took over the Commonwealth with the raiders, raiders are always cannon fodder.

So, it didn't really change my life, per se, but I have remembered it all these years, and still have no interest in finishing the game.

Final Fantasy 7, the first two Fallout and Disco Elyisum, Shenmue to an extent, but the Yakuza / Like A Dragon franchise probably tops all of them. I had stopped paying attention to video games after the dreamcast (I considered Shenmue the apex of what I liked in video games and couldn't find something similar), discovered the Yakuza franchise through Judgment in early 2020 and I was hooked, it was everything I had ever dreamed of in a game. I bought a PS4 specifically to play them, bought 0 to 6 during covid lockdowns and pretty much blasted through the franchise in a year. Rekindled my interest in games and in Japanese stuff, made me take my ass back to martial arts and generally pay more attention to how I behave and look after bad breakups and depression. Disco Elysium came very close to the same impact, I might add.

• Bioshock and Bioshock 2
• half life 2, especially episode 2 but that's just a cliffhanger
• fallout 3 just great ending event hough a bit nonsensical the build up made it feel importantf
• every single From Software game but then you're just excited for new game plus

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.

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

Hacknet, Disco Elysium, Life Is Strange

Kingdom Hearts. The story is a little confusing at first but replaying them after getting it shows new things. The whole, “My friends are my power!” really resonates with me to this day. 358/2 Days is the best story, and I cry every time I hear Xion’s story. I named my dog Xion because I love the character and what she represents so much. Can’t wait till #4!

Not really computer games.

Camarilla. A LARP that I was part of for about ten years. I met hundreds of people. A few girlfriends. There were chapters all over the world with a couch to crash on and a group of nerds into the same shit I was. I drifted from my local group and they fell apart a few years later. I've recently reconnected with some remnants of that group and in the blink of an eye I've found twenty friends and have a busy social life.

JiuJitsu. I don't see it as an art. I don't see it as a way to beat someone up. I see it as IRL PvP. I got into it from the early Joe Rogan podcasts where he had obscure interesting guests rather than the coco bananas direction he's been on for the last 10+ years.

World of Warcraft 2. A pirated copy got me a job at my local collectible card store. They had a computer in the store but weren't IT nerdy kids like I was. I'd downloaded it from a pirate BBS, YES BBS, that a friend at school ran. I like that Steam sees developers getting paid but man was DOS piracy next level easy, you were more likely to need the "decoder" that came with the game to act as the license.

Osu!, but not in the good direction... the game might have deleted what little confidence I have left in myself and gave me crippling perfectionism issues. Also permanently changed my music taste. May or may not have set me up on a hyper-competitive career path as well so there is that. Upside is... I'm fun at the club and the arcade maybe??

Dark Souls.

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

Deus Ex

Doom Eternal after completing the game and all the DLC. They put you through HELL (literally) and these levels are a BITCH at the end and the sigh of relief to see this arc of the story finally come to a close is so satisfying.

Doom 2016 was an overall better game from an atmospheric perspective, and it had better direction overall, but Eternal was just fun and hard. If you can bare it on at least ultra-violence the sense of completion at the end of it all is quite gratifying.