Games that made you genuinely emotional: share without shame

[Andy89]

The stigma around games being emotionally serious art has reduced but the conversations about specific emotional moments in games still sometimes carry unnecessary embarrassment. This thread is an explicit permission slip to discuss what games made you feel things and to be specific about what and why.

Could be a story beat, a piece of music, a moment of environmental storytelling that landed harder than expected. All valid.

[EthanHinds]

The end of a game I will not name because I do not want to spoil it for anyone who has not played it. The final twenty minutes recontextualised everything before them in a way that left me sitting in silence for a while. The medium is genuinely capable of things other art forms cannot do.

[Andy89]

A game from about fifteen years ago where I named a character after someone who had just died. Completely changes the emotional register of the whole thing in retrospect. Games remember what you put into them.

[MondayMoan67]

The music in a specific area of a specific exploration game that felt like an encounter with pure longing. Nothing narrative, just a combination of environment and sound that produced something I can only describe as pre-emptive grief.

[Hitman04]

A boss fight that I was told is optional and that turned out to be the most emotionally affecting thing in the game if you understand the lore behind it. The game does not explain, you have to find out. When you do, the difficulty of the fight feels right.

[Finley]

The ending of a game about grief that I played during a difficult period in my life. I know the game was doing something specific and I was not a neutral observer but I also think it earns its emotional effects technically. Both things are true.