It wasn’t exactly profound so much as it was a sudden appreciation for just how deep the game had gotten its hooks in me.

The end of Persona 5.

I was sad because it was over, but not just because I liked the game, I’ve experienced that before with plenty of others. What I felt at the end of that game was something I’d never felt playing a video game before, and that was a sense of loss. I didn’t just want to play more of the game, I wanted to spend more time with these characters. I’d gotten so attached to them, and so into the life sim aspect, that when the credits rolled, it felt a little like I lost my friends.

Now granted this was during covid, and I was quarantined alone, having not been able to see my actual friends in months. Burning through Persona 5 became my primary unwinding activity for a few months, and as I got deeper into it, I spent solid days with it. So it’s fair to say I was in a very susceptible state of mind to attach myself to some characters.

But even without that, I think that game really hit something special for me that made me temporarily forget these weren’t real people, and for a fleeting moment, I felt a profound sadness at their absence

Spec Ops: The Line

It’s story is based on Heart of Darkness, the same book Apocalypse Now was based on, so they share some commonalities.

Gameplay wise it’s a pretty standard 3rd person cover shooter, nothing really memorable.

But man that game fucks with your head and expectations of a shooter. While you mow down hordes of fellow American soldiers who have gone AWOL with their commander, the tone of the game constantly shifts ever so slightly. You lose people from your team, you get to be more and more vengeful and violent. And at first you think nothing of it, because that’s almost every shooter I’ve played.

But they let you see yourself in a mirror, so to say.

I think the first time it really hit me was when on one of the loading screen tooltips, that usually said stuff like “You can throw grenades back.” or “Flank your enemies.” it just said “Do you feel like a hero yet?”. Felt like I’d been punched in the gut. It gets more and more intense from there and I can’t really describe it all, because it’s been a decade or so and it was mostly the sum of a lot of smaller things.

I know some people called it corny and pretentious but it really stuck with me.

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.

Subnautica; at the beginning your pod drops into the surface of the ocean, then you open the hatch and you climb out… to see an infinite expanse of blue sea under a blue sky.

That triggered so many memories for me, I had to take a minute. The color grading on that scene was on point.

One of the Quake games has a section where you get captured, then put on a conveyor belt where you see other people in front of you get mutilated, then that happens to you. That scene almost triggered a dissociative episode.

The original ending of Mass Effect 3 brought me to tears because the Clint Mansell music meshed so well with the on-screen segments, it really moved me. That said I also like the remastered ending; the latter is like the last few chapters of Lord Of The Rings, the former is like an American movie ending.

Jeff getting shot in Uncharted 2. He at one point gets wounded and Drake (the player) has to do the shoulder-carry-walk thing with him in the middle of an urban attack. He’s in a bad state and isn’t the fastest, but he’s whatshername’s coworker and you’re his only hope out of there.

And then right when you get to your destination, there’s Lazarevic, and he shoots Jeff dead.

I encountered a rogue AI in Starfield that was kind of a trip. I ended up letting it go to be its own person.

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.

My realization came from DDLC. I learned about what other people can feel after you’ve left

There are so many now, the one that comes to mind, maybe not the best but it’s the one, is Braid. I don’t want to spoil the ending, but I basically played the game in one sitting and the way the game ended just made something click into place in my mind and changed the way I think about the human experience.

When I was around 8 years old I was lucky enough to get a PS2 for Christmas. Because I was young, my dad and I usually played games together so he could help me out if things got tough. One of the first games we played on the PS2 was ICO. My dad picked it up in the whim because he thought the box art was interesting knowing basically nothing. I still remember when the first cutscenes booted up and our jaws dropped to the floor. It was so much more beautiful and cinematic than any we had played. It was one of the first time I truly felt transported another world and I grew so attached to the horned boy and glowing girl. We played it every day and, talked about all the mysteries and theories we about it when we weren’t. When we finally defeated the epic last boss fight against the dark queen and the Castle start collapsing I got scared for the horned boy and glowing girl. I couldn’t tell you how long it actually took for the final scene to appear but it felt like forever. When I saw my lil horned friend finally escaped the castle and was on a beautiful beach with a boat he could be able anywhere, I couldn’t help but to start crying it was just such a great ending and was so cathartic after going through a dark and mysterious castle for so long.

I think it really changed the way I thought about the medium. That a game where I couldn’t really tell you what exactly what was happening and had no understandable dialogue could move me so much changed the way I thought about the medium and media in general. Nobody can ever convince me games are not art because I know I connected to ICO in a way in a way beyond just having fun. The fact it’s been over 20 years and I still recall my emotions so vividly I think is a testament to the power of video games as an artistic medium.

When I started playing Horizon zero dawn, for first dozen hours I was in the state that fears the machines and sneaks everywhere.

Aloy’s voice still terrifies me, I wish there was an option to turn off her random monologues.

Echoes of the Eye expansion to Outer Wilds. I managed to avoid all the spoilers, watched some playthroughs but thankfully didn’t study them too closely. Importantly, the streamers never looked “up” during the parts of the gameplay that I’ve seen, so to me it appeared just like another normal environment (well, normal at least by Outer Wilds standards). I already loved the original game, and decided I must play this for myself.

So when I entered through that doorway for the first time I was genuinely stunned. “You fuckers, you really did it this time. You actually went ahead and did it!” I mean…

Dark Souls

Not a specific moment but there’s been plenty of essays written on how that game has enabled people to lift themselves out of dark places in their lives. There’s a catharsis in the repetitive nature of the game and perseverance to “git gud”.

Cyberpunk 2077 The Star ending which is the one where you leave with the Aldecados.

Then there are a couple of endings that left me with complete dread/empty but I am not going to say more if you played the game you know what I mean.

0.000% of Communism has been built. Evil child-murdering billionaires still rule the world with a shit-eating grin. All he has managed to do is make himself sad. He is starting to suspect Kras Mazov fucked him over personally with his socio-economic theory. It has, however, made him into a very, very smart boy with something like a university degree in Truth. Instead of building Communism, he now builds a precise model of this grotesque, duplicitous world.

I had to stare at the window for an hour afterwards.