Gaming

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

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

SOMA

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.

Fallout 3

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.

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.

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.

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.

• 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

RDR2

Deus Ex

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!

Since noone mentioned it, for me it is Inmost. A beautiful pixelart game that covers some heavy topics.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Some games give you "end credits", but if you safe and reload, it puts you in the next chapter...

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.

Borderlands pre sequel clap trap dlc ends ending titles

Jumpman Junior, 1986. thousand yard stare C E D F E F G E D E F D C E D F G F E D C

Also, Friendship with Benefits.

edit holy shit they released FwB 2 in April. BRB.

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

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.