When knuckles helps you in sonic 3&K (yes I'm old)

I beat mgs2 when i was like 14 and I just sat at the end of my bed and pondered for like 3 hours before moving again

MGS 2

also MGS 1, but the ending of MGS2 👀

Shuaaan! Shuaaaan! Shuaaaaaaaaaan!

Kentucky Route Zero came to me at a shaky time in my life. Such that it was full of impactful moments. Maybe made more so by myself living in the often grim, beautiful and haunted place that is east Kentucky -and of course late stage capitalism.

Orchids to Dusk is another that inspires awe. Though it is entirely about looking for a nice place to die.

Walking into Leyndell in Elden Ring for the first time realizing this might be the greatest game of all time.

Fallout 3, The Pitt DLC. Deciding whether to take the baby.

Obligatory FF7...

There's an old PS 1 game called Legend of Dragoon... not too bad of a game but probably gameplay wise doesn't hold up. BUT... its basically you getting a team of heroes from several the surviving races after another race (the only one who could naturally use magic) decided to do a genocide against everybody (and lost badly).

There is a scene later in the game, where you're in the ruins of a floating city that (I think) was the capital of the genociders. It is a barren husk of a place, devoid of all sentient life, there are no survivors of this race. However, some of the their machines were made with magic and are running on autopilot. There is a room where you can just hang out and watch these little flying robot things zip around and have scripted NPC dialogue where rules/laws are submitted and passed.

It was this weird example of the banality of evil that I don't think I've come across in a game before or since.

This is a great question, lots of interesting replies.

There's so many points for me that were also turning points for gaming. Watching the pixels move on the TV because they were being told to by the console, from the original Pong, to Atari 2600 Space Invaders, were all events that left an impression. Playing a Williams licenced Defender on an Atari 400, and Donkey Kong.

I grew up with all this, it was part of my childhood.

Then, one day, some friends got a Playstation, the original. I went round and they were playing Die Hard. They had the gun controller that came with it. I watched for a bit and I couldn't keep up, things happening so quickly it looked so intense and sort of real. It was fascinating but also terrifying.

Then it was my turn, I said no it's not for me I can't do that. Go on they said and pushed the gun at me. Alright, but I'll be shit.

Some time passed and I found myself moving through an airport, my friends barking as each baddie appeared and going silent as I popped them and moved on. Slick, efficient, deadly.

I stopped and held the gun loosely, they turned protesting in dismay. I was shaking and sweating, I couldn't go on. Something changed that day, I knew games were different now. There was no going back, from now on I would always be a First Person Shooter.

Old-ass example: Zelda: Majora's Mask. Waiting for the mooncrash with Anju, Kafei showing up at the last minute, and them telling Link to save himself and leave them to die together. It was the first time I saw tragic beauty in a medium I mostly knew for either childlike joy or gleeful violence (depending on if the game was E or M rated lmao)

Newish example: Towards the latter half of Supergiant Games' Pyre, as it becomes clear that the stars are going out, and only a few will get to leave the Downside, and the entire team is looking downcast and they turn to you, their reader, the crippled scholar who would never be able to ascend due to being unable to partake in the games of magic basketball, but who had guided them this far, for guidance. And the game just lets you -- Write the speech you'll give to your friends. I had never seen a game do anything of the sort. My jaw was on the floor.

When I was younger, I had really only experienced console games and maybe a few basic PC games at school. My uncle showed my this FPS game on his computer called Redneck Rampage. Basically you're running around farms trying to kill aliens. I don't really remember playing very many FPS game before that and it opened up a whole new world for me. But the really crazy part was how "adult" the game was. You could drink beer in the game and your character would get drunk. I also remember some graffiti in the game of a naked woman with huge tits. At the time I could not believe something like that would be allowed in a video game! Blew my mind.

Probably different to most people but I remember the first year of Uni summer holidays I spent playing Fable 3… which ended up being the entire 3mth holiday. I realised in real terms I just moved from one part of the cd to another and hadn’t accomplished anything else with my life in that time, no hobbies, friends or shared experiences.

I packed up my Xbox and refused to play another game for about 10yrs. Now I have a much better balance with games and my life

In Rain World interacting with Moon especially if you don't know what is going on then go back once you can communicate with her.

Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura still remains my favourite to this day.

The world's setting is centred around how capitalism and industry affects society, how it pushed aside feudalism, how racism remains endemic and easily seen as normal, how history is swept away to hide attitudes, all sorts of complex things. Early on in the story, you get involved with a strike by exploited half-orcs and the wealthy factory owner who would rather they all died. Thinking back, it was a big part of how young me started to realise industrial relations are fucked up in capitalism.

One moment (of the many cool things) that really hit me, is that there's an entire sub-plot across the whole continent that's never explicitly mentioned, but is entirely noticeable if you actually pay attention and listen, not to the quest-givers or the industrial leaders, but to the servants of the powerful men you meet. If you're lucky, near the end, you suddenly realise you just.. swept all these weird characters and remarks under the rug as you had 'important' people to talk to. I had relegated servants and whole in-game races to an 'unimportant' role, when actually their stories are key to a whole second sub-plot of their own that affects everything in the world.

I know a lot of that behaviour is because I'm playing to typical game design, but, I dunno, having a real moment where you think back and realise you've been ignoring what should have been an obvious pattern of so many exploited people, and I just glossed over it 'til that moment, it affected me.

Nier automata had that moment for me. At first I was pissed, just getting another playthrough with slightly different mechanics... But that quickly wore off when i realized how much more depth that second pass was adding to the story.

Then, with the full context at the climax of the first half, I cried... Where the red fern grows and that are the only two pieces of media that hit me that deep.

Then, when things are getting all jrpg-ending crazy and i thought I would get nothing but a bit more lore and maybe another death scene, they did it again, but different. The climax floored me, as again things I had long accepted as just slightly mysterious, but mostly explained, backdrop (it's set post extinction after all) clicked into place again and I just sat there in awe. There was a mystery you had to work to understand, and multiple big twists leading to the finale...

It was already a good, complete story. I thought we were done. But then the final piece clicks into place, and everything I already knew intimately (I messed up one ending before I looked up the ones I was missing, but otherwise 100%d it).

Now the world had another layer of implication, which peeled away another, and another. I just sat in shock as the story changed over and over, as I thought through the story I'd played through again and again. The hints are everywhere from the beginning, but it's all cycles within cycles, growing bigger and faster with every new layer of recontextualizaion

It gave you the time to reel from the impact let it sink in... You sit there, your mind blank, in awe of how the game gently planted one tiny bomb at a time throughout the experience, and despite dropping bombs the whole time, they managed to remain unexploded. Then the final one hits just right, and the next explodes. Around and around it goes, blasting away what you thought was the dirt the experience sat on. It reveals this beautiful mural, only for the explosions to destroy it to reveal another, and another... Usually following the thread of the story, but occasionally cutting across the familiar timeline.

So you're in awe at how a game could make you feel all this, just in shock

Then the last cutscene gently draws your eyes back into focus. A slow and melancholy scene plays, and it's like viscerally grasping the size of the sun, only to turn around and see the Milky Way... All of this was just one bead in an endless chain. And before you can taint that emotionally deep but intellectually worthless moment by thinking too hard on it, it starts the credits.

It's an extremely difficult but very simple asteroid , and you finally die, but respawn right away. There's no counter, no punishment, no reward, but you start to see how long you can survive... It doesn't require much thought or strategy, it just keeping you just occupied enough that you can't let your mind wander. Then another ship appears and it changes nothing, but one after another appears, and suddenly the tides are being beat back by the sheer number of other ships firing alongside you. It crescendos and fades gently.

And then, in this raw and disoriented state, the game gives you a question. Sacrifice your save, and you can join the wave of fellow players who helped make that tiny desert mint of a feeling of connectedness when others finish off the experience.

It's a meaningless sacrifice - that last minigame wasn't really that special, and the game can't be lost. At that moment, my game save was so emotionally important to me, and plenty others had already made that little sacrifice - mine would do nothing. I might pick the game back up - I still had one more ending, and I'd have to do it all again to get the final two achievements anyways. I'd come back and finish again, and I'd take the other path, completing the journey. Not now - I just combed through every inch of the world, trying to squeeze every last collectible dry to extend the end a little more. But this was my first completion, this one should be the trophy.

I'm ashamed of that moment when I said no. The trophy was as meaningless to me as the sacrifice would have been to future players... But I now understand that little symbolic sacrifice wasn't about them, it was about me.

The final act of the game came years later, when the details had faded. I had tried to pick it up a few times, but there's another genius part of the game - the intro ship sequence is terrible. It's very long, and slow, and there's no checkpoints. If I hadn't just paid for the game, and was just shown that this was just a minigame, I would've refunded it immediately. It doesn't respect your time, it doesn't offer story, it's not really challenging, but although it's very easy, you do have to focus and play it - the instant death is very easy to avoid, but even letting yourself get hit to see what happens means a couple of minutes of nothing. You realize it's the perfect mirror of the ending, your squad is stripped away until you're incredibly strong but alone, the enemies few but will kill you if you don't try. It's 100x worse after completing the game once - you already know what happens, you know you have to do it at least once more to reach the end again, and there's no anticipation of a new world - you still could draw it out from memory because while it's small. It feels big initially because of how you run around in circles as it changes around you, but going back...I finally finished the into, looked around, and closed the game.

A tried again with the same result, but a couple years ago I finally felt sure it was time! I forced myself through the intro, blazed through the story, repeated the into again. I found I'd collected most of the weapons and was gearing up effortlessly... And as I ran it through again, I saw the cracks. The textures had aged, they looked terrible now. Invisible walls are everywhere. The combat system is tight, but easy once learned. It's not hard. The main obstacle is slow moving balls with obvious patterns. The weapons each have different patterns to learn, but I knew them still. I could blaze through it with any combination of gear... But I had a goal, and I wasn't going to just give it up again. I'd never again play what for years I'd written essays about how it was possibly the most well crafted game ever made. Nothing else has ever made me feel so much

And finally, I got to the moment that made me cry, and I felt nothing. The game sucked. I played through half the next section on autopilot, getting to the part I remembered less clearly... And I put the controller down. Again I felt shame at not sacrificing my save. I came to terms with the fact that doing it now would mean nothing.

And this is the final cycle. Every time someone asks about the best game ever, I say it's Nier: Automata. Because none of it is on accident. It was meant to taste like dirt in your mouth when you came back to make that sacrifice like you promised yourself.

:::Spoiler:::The pacing of the reveal of 4a's assignment, to kill 2b when she learns too much, doesn't hit again. When you learn this specific 4a had killed her before, and when he tries to sacrifice himself to save her, or at least so he won't have to kill her again, or when she ends up dying to save him... These moments can only be had once, even if the details fade.:::

.I don't recommend this game anymore - it's a masterpiece of pacing and tying up your emotions in knots only to pull it loose at the right moment - the pacing doesn't work anymore, all media is faster now. It cant be remastered or revamped, the story itself isn't that good

It's a trancedent experience, or it's trash - balanced on the knifes edge purposely. It can only be experienced once, by an active game who has never played more modern games, or it doesn't hit at all.

It changed be as a person, and I think of it often. I will sacrifice so much more now, because it made me understand - when everyone comes together and achieves something impossible, it's not all the same if the result doesn't change. Your sacrifice doesn't really matter much to the result if they have enough, but the you that made that symbolic sacrifice is so much greater than the one who held back.

Basically the whole premise of Paradise Killer. Who ought to seek justice? Can a government be irredeemable? Is justice even possible?

Baldur's Gate 3. Karlach's reaction once you kill Gortash. One of the few times I've ever really respected a videogame's writing and voice acting on a serious level.

It wasn't super meaningful from a narrative perspective, but no one who played Unreal when it was new is likely to forget that first step off the Vortex Riker onto Na Pali. Sure, there had been games like Myst, but this not only elevated how beautiful games can be, but put the player right in the middle of it like nothing else did. Not an easy moment to recreate. To be honest, that game plus UT2003/04 had some of the best graphics in the business, from both the technical and design standpoints.

The prison escape in the first Deus Ex, when you learn where you really are. I guess for some people this was easy to figure out beforehand, but when I first played it at age 15 it was a shock to me.

Witcher 3. Spoilers here, btw.

I will never forget riding my horse up to The Baron's residence after losing his child and his wife and seeing him hanging from the tree. They do such a good job making his character barely tolerable at first, then make him slowly grow on you after you learn he's just like you. Scared, confused, and lost. He lashes out because he's trying to protect his family, but the weight of losing it is the end is too much for him.

Truly, what a masterclass in narrative design, and it's only a sliver of what that game has to offer.

The first one that comes to mind is the betrayal of King Cailan at Ostagar in Dragon Age: Origins, and the aftermath where you and your party have to escape into the Korcari Wilds.

That whole scene is just incredible.

Kicking a window through because my brother beat me at Pipemania.

OneShot. The main story does something interesting early on to draw you in, then with the post game content I have just never felt so connected to a game. it's hard to describe without spoilers. I started the game in the evening then there I was at like 2am "I can't sleep until this world is free". you just really feel like you personally have a part in the story.