Whomst amongst us has not cried over polygons?
Life is Strange made me realize I desperately wanted to be a lesbian, despite ostensibly being a guy. I wanted to go through to the mundanities of life as a woman with a girlfriend more than anything. I didn't even care about the time travel, I was just jealous of getting to do things like watering a plant as a girl, and practicing guitar as a girl, and walking around talking to people as a girl. ... so anyway, I'm out of the closet now.
Oh, and Pathologic 2 left me feeling more connected to the human race and the earth, and serenely comfortable with my mortality.
Going the opposite direction of where most people were taking this: Bioshock Infinite. A game that really set me up to thinking I was going to be John Brown and turned me into Jake Tapper instead. The whole game set up this theme of rebirth and redemption, and when the game dropped the fact that Booker DeWitt, the player, was literally a white supremacist war criminal, I was taken aback but honestly I was pretty hooked. Here was this man trying to bring them the girl and wipe away the debt, and it got me thinking of what could someone honestly do if they realized what kind of horrendous, despicable things they had done in the past with no real way to atone for it? How does someone get up in the morning knowing "I was one of the direct perpetrators of the Wounded Knee massacre" while also realizing how heinous that action was? How can you redeem the irredeemable? These questions really caught my attention during the game, and while it was setting up the plotline of a secret underground resistance led by POC against their white supremacist oppressors, I GENUINELY thought that Booker was going to try and redeem himself from his past by fighting with the Vox, knowing that while it won't fix the racist injustices he had committed in the past, he could still spend his life fighting for a more equitable future
Of course, if anyone reading this actually played Bioshock Infinite, you know that literally none of that happens, Booker never has any character growth or reconciliation for his actions, and the game pulls a massive enlightened centrist move by equating people in a fucking slave revolt to be as bad as their oppressors and the game ends in this very stupid, confusing "billion different alternate timelines" nonsense where no one learns anything.
Imo burial at sea part two made the Vox even worse, what with the whole Daisy Fitzroy only threatening to kill that child so Elizabeth would kill her. It not only made the Vox make less sense, but also destroyed one of the few consistent themes that bioshock infinite had.
And destroyed a good deal of Bioshock at the same time. All while making Elizabeth less interesting.
That's BioShock's main problem, isn't it? As a standalone game it was good but they had to keep going back, retconing and over-explaining things until neither its setting nor message were any good. The BioShock sequels retroactively make the first game worse.
going dark side in the original kotor was pretty much the last time i did an evil path in any game, most of it was pretty banal kick-a-puppy-and-cackle shit but the bit on the beach near the end messed me up
spoiler
one of your earliest followers is this earnest-but-naive teenage girl with a tentacle head who grew up an orphan in the worst slums and had a wookiee best friend who was basically her father figure, and when you save the wookiees life he has some sort of unbreakable life debt oath to you. theres a bit where you land on a beach at the end and if youre dark side enough the girl will refuse to keep following you, and you can invoke the life debt to compel the wookiee to choke his only friend and surrogate daughter to death with his own hands
yeah even as an edgy teenager i felt really dirty and awful, and could never bring myself to do an evil run of anything since
I have a deep suspicion of people who play the "Bad Guys" in PC RPGs and TTRPGs. Unless I'm extremely frustrated and just going through the motions the "Evil" options usually make me feel really bad and gross, and I always wonder why someone else would want to feel that way, or what they're actually feeling instead of bad and gross. Same reason I don't trust Confederate Civil War reenactors or wheraboos. Sure, study history, but why would you want to re-create that.
Yeah, I mean I get the urge to play a dominating force, but there are literally a dozen historical choices from Napoleon to Cao Cao with better motivations for your morally questionable 1-tag.
I'd love to do living history in non western cultures.
But while I'd like to take part I'm also the whitest person alive so I think I might not be the person to take charge of that.
Seeing Lucas reckon with the fact that the prequels suck will never not be funny to me
Oh hell I remember that bit. Forced myself to do a dark side run through gritted teeth and now that scene is burned into my retinas
RDR2
spoiler
when the horse died at the end and high honor Arthur comforted her as she took her last breath
That wasn't ok of them to do. It still hurts and I hate that I'm glad they did it
SPOILER ALERT - CAN'T MAKE FORMATTING WORK ON MY PHONE.
IF YOU HAVE NOT PLAYED THE GAME "JOURNEY" YET, DON'T READ THIS. DON'T READ ANYTHING - JUST GO PLAY IT. Truly a beautiful experience made better the less you know ahead of time.
I think maybe my favorite gaming experience ever was when I played Journey when it first came out. I had avoided any spoilers and went in knowing absolutely nothing about it except the positive reviews. The beginning, the MUSIC, the pacing, the puzzles, and the friend you find along the way, all of it was just so beautiful to me. I loved chirping and the companion character chirping back, my heart stopped when the character got hit by one of the giant enemies and I was filled with joy when they got free, I loved that we huddled together climbing up the mountain for warmth, chirping to encourage each other to go on. And then of course that marvelous ending when you make it in a triumphant explosion of energy and animation, racing racing racing to the top after such a marvelous journey with a computer friend I had never felt so connected to before with absolutely no dialogue of course...
And then the credits roll, and you realize that it was ANOTHER player the entire time. You had just gone on this massive adventure solving puzzles, finding hidden secrets, and chirping like goddamn idiots for hours with another person, not a computer player
It absolutely blew me away and I cried at the simplistic beauty of it all. I've never felt such pure joy during a revelation from a gaming experience, neither before nor since. It still gets me now recalling it. The game became all the more fulfilling after the first play through, and each time your cloak became a bit more decorated.
It let you know when you were with someone who was in on the secret or not, so you got to show someone around if they were a newbie and reexperience the joy through new eyes vicariously that way. I still remember when I met my first white cloak and it was stunning in its own way. You unlocked the white cloak when you had found all of the secrets in the game, and on that playthrough they showed me all of the hidden spots and the tricks to get there, thus helping me to unlock the white cloak as well. Thus each white cloak shepherded subsequent players to the same secrets and passed the knowledge along.
All of it was just such a fantastic experience. I wish I could go back and experience that joy and surprise again, to hear the music for the first time, and to chirp friendly little songs only to have them chirped right back at me. If you haven't played the game before, read nothing else and see if you can find a way to play it now. It's a magical experience.
Thanks for inviting me to remember it this evening. Been a while since I've had a good cry and I needed the help.
Outer Wilds - I was expecting a bargain bin No Man's Sky and what I got was one of the most genuinely hopeful, life-affirming, eating-the-strawberry-on-the-cliff games I've ever played.
Especially the new DLC - It's like if you took that "In the end? Nothing ever ends" quote from Watchmen, made it more poignant and then stretched it out into a seven hour game about
spoiler
the digitized ghosts of alien barn owls.
Absolutely deserved all the awards it got.
I cannot recommend this game enough. I didn't play it for way too long because something about the trailers made me think it was way less open world than it is. It's Myst with a manually controlled spaceship and full 3D access to an entire solar system, and such a peaceful and hopeful ending.
eating-the-strawberry-on-the-cliff
You know that story! I love that story, it's half of what keeps me getting out of bed!
I won't be original here, but I finished Disco Elysium 4 times and I cried every time, for different reasons, just can't help it. No other popular culture product even came close. Maybe Beasts of the Southern Wild, the movie, but still not even close.
It has more emotional range than any game starring
spoiler
a gym teacher
has any right to have
spoiler
I shot Ruby by rolling bad dice--it felt so bad, but i thought it'd be more authentic to keep going without reloading 😭
spoiler
my one critique of the game is the ruby section tbh. i talked for like 2 lines and then had an opening to turn off the machine, told her not to kill herself and then she ran away immediately. the whole story i never really met ruby and it was very unsatisfying. i spent days looking for her and didn't learn anything!
spoiler
That's the only location in the game where you meet her, but you learn a lot (of false information) about her from Klasje, by searching Ruby's truck (which I didn't even discover on my 1st playthrough), and from the Hardy Boys. I've had a pretty long convo with her in that hideout, but it probably also depend on the type of character you are building. That said, whether you kill her or she runs away, it does feel rather abrupt.
I actually cried when Mordin sacrificed his self to cure the genophage.
It's possible for him to survive but you have to really fuck the Krogans up to the point that he believes the genophage would be a mercy.
God I cannot accept destroying the Geth, but I LOVE the Legion exchange if Tali has to do it. The heartbreaking response to the question is too much dude.
Persona 3 - the ending, just the ending. And the accompanying song, Kimi No Kioku once I read the translation
Final Fantasy IX - I think it was the scene of the Iifa Tree battle on the ocean at the end of disc 2. I had a lot of complex feelings about Garnet and the queen and that scene was something else.
Dragon Age Origins - I wanted to be the goodest do-gooder and the game let me.
MegaMan Legends 1 & 2 - Just all of the really sad lore and the music could hit just right sometimes. Also I'm Tron/MegaMan shipper.
Fire Emblem for the GBA - largely for having a silent protagonist with my name. As a kid, that was a first for me and I was able to picture myself being there and included. So after everything that happened, I didn't want it to end.
So, I very much remember the first time I cried because of a game, it was Mega Man 64 (the Nintendo 64 port of Mega Man Legends)
In the main town of the game, there's a little girl in a wheelchair who says that there's a procedure that might help her walk again, but it's too expensive
And you can pay for it, you can just be like "I don't need this upgrade, you can have this instead"
And during the credits, the little girl is standing on her own two feet waving goodbye to you as you fly off towards a new adventure
I was 12 and I think that was the first time I ever cried from something that ever made me happy
Prey (the arkane one)
spoilers ahead
The section in the habitation deck tore me up a bit emotionally. Specifically collecting the Abigail and Danielle diary tapes in order to access deep storage. I managed to sus out the "chef" and tasered him while I searched the freezer room. Discovering the last tape you need on Abigail's corpse and then having to tell Danielle that she's dead is so bleak. She pretty much loses the will to live in real time.
“Lamby looks soft."
"Yes. Very soft." Suddenly she pushes the stuffed animal toward your face.
"I don't deserve it. I'm scum."
"Press your damn cheek against Lamby, okay?" The lieutenant sounds authoritative -- and surprisingly gruff.
:lt-dbyf-dubois: :lt-kitsuragi:
Death Stranding gave me all kinds of feels I haven't felt in a long time. Find yourself someone who loves you like Kojima loves his own personal vision of America.
Spiritfarer, I feel like it's impossible not to cry at least a couple of times. Absolutely beautiful game, probably in my top ten of all time, and I've played a fuck ton of games.
I don't think anyone could have known what to expect from Undertale, but that game has made me feel things that no other game has.
Also I thought RDR2 was gonna be fun times cowboy simulator and then it made me cry and reconsider my own actions in the face of mortality
