Since you’re ok with horror, I highly recommend both Detention and Devotion by Red Candle Games. Both of them start out as horror, then gut punch you as you realize what’s going on. Devotion is an amazing example of domestic horror (the horror that can happen inside the home), and Detention is the horror that people do when they don’t realize the consequences of their actions. Devotion has stuck with me, and to this day the last line makes me want to cry.
Edit: Managed to find detention, it looks very very cool and might exactly fit what I’m looking for, but why is there only the soundtrack for devotion on steam?
You can only get Devotion on Red Candle’s website, thanks to Chinese censorship bullshit. It got pulled off Steam, then when GOG said they would sell it, they freaked out because they were worried about CP2077 sales and claimed “gamers” complaining made them change their mind (but wouldn’t respond to anyone asking for specifics).
There was a random art asset that compared Xi Jinping to Winnie the Pooh that didn’t get taken out in time.
Their partner in China got their business license pulled, and they took the game off Steam when it started getting review bombed. It was a big mess over the stupidest thing.
Luckily, they were eventually able to get it up in their own site for sale, but the damage is done. They lost so much in sales and momentum. The game truly is amazing, and this game had just started to really get buzz around it when all this happened. Barely anyone even knows it now, even though it’s one of the best psychological horror and family tragedy games out there.
I look at everything happening with the Silent Hill 2 remake and wish Red Candle hadn’t gotten kneecapped by bullshit so they could be the ones doing it.
Thank you for reminding me of this. I loved Detention, they did a great job of transitioning to an intriguing story once the horror elements got less scary (as they naturally do as you get used to a horror game.)
If you haven’t played Devotion, I really can’t recommend it enough. It’s a completely different style from Detention, but they did that same really good job of transitioning to the story.
"One Shot", it has a few achievements that might require going back to try to complete.
It is puzzle top down story adventure game( it does the whole look into your actual files for solutions thing), once I finished the main story I felt satisified. It allows for playing after the ending but doing so feels hollow and unsatisifying which is the point. It asks the question of why do you still want to play, but oh well I will allow it and makes it possible.
I never played Myst as a kid but when I tried it a few years ago, the puzzles seem really hard and abstract by today’s standards.
And I played a LOT of point and click games, and most I can solve without a walkthrough. But the 15 mins in Myst felt like I need to play it with a guide.
I replayed it the other week after not touching it since the original release. Was fun. I managed to forget a bunch of puzzles, and the new graphics made it fun to just explore the Ages.
Mass effect and dragon age series from bioware are excellent, they’re a little involved but the story telling is incredible in both. While it has aged and may be depending on a love for star wars, their knights of the old republic series was also excellent.
They’re really damn good at making a story that’s worth being part of, often one of my first recommendations aside from the last of us, outer wilds, and a couple of others I’ve seen here already.
There is a game from the MS-DOS age of 1996 called Realms of the Haunting where you traverse large open areas for hours searching for items and interactables needed to progress.
You might clear it a second time just to make the experience seem like a linear cohesive string of events but I can’t imagine you would want to clear it any more than that.
If you’re okay with “walking sims”, Dear Esther is the only game that ever brought a tear to my eye. I played it shortly after someone close to me died and the ending really hit me.
It’s basically 100% “emotional writing” so it might be up your alley.
Escape Academy? It’s a great escape room game (even better in co-op) but it’s more engaging than Escape Simulator since there’s a story pulling everything together. The story’s ridiculous but honestly the context adds entertainment value, regardless of how absurd it is.
SuperBrothers: Sword and Sworcery probably fits this bill. It’s an odd game, but I love the shit out of every minute of it. I have 3 hours in that game. I haven’t touched it since 2013, but I still remember just how ethereal and soothing it was while still being an exciting adventure game. One of the odder things about it is how it instructs you when and for how long to play it. For example, it tells you to stop playing it for a few weeks so the moon’s phase can change. Not that that’s a bad thing, but
Maybe a dumb suggestion, but since you mentioned older systems, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night is a PS1 classic that helped create the Metroidvania genre. There's also Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, which is a spiritual successor by one the key developers behind SOTN. Dead Cells and Hollow Knight are solid games that have been recommended already, but if you find yourself enjoying the rogue-lite elements of those you might enjoy Cult of the Lamb. Admittedly it's top down 2.5d, but it's a nice blend of rogue lite and town management as your tasked with building up a cult and turning it into a thriving community in between fighting your way through dungeons.
Maybe What Remains of Edith Finch? Also, maybe it was just a weird time in my life, but I think I bawled hardest at the end of FFVII: Crisis Core back in the PSP days. Braid is an emotionally weird one as well.
Braid is a side-scrolling puzzle platformer with a mind-bending and somewhat heartbreaking twist at the end. I played it ages ago, but will never forget it. I don’t think it was very long.
Edith Finch is pretty squarely a “walking simulator,” but by far the best one I’ve played (Firewatch is up there, but didn’t stick with me the same way). It makes the most of its relatively simple gameplay by adding in a bunch of unique gimmicks and visuals for each section.
Final Fantasy X still holds my personal ugly-cry record. To this day, I can’t hear some of the music from it without tearing up. It’s one of those games that has emotional react videos on YouTube.
Shadow of the Colossus manages to be emotional with very little explicit story. A lot of it has to do with its use of dynamic music in an orchestral soundtrack.
Persona 3 just had a remake, and that’s part of a series that can really gets its hooks into you. A big part of it is the parasocial gameplay, but even if you’re not the type to get into that, the story is still very moving. Persona series composer Shoji Meguro recently said the ending theme in this game was his magnum opus.
Persona 3 is one of the “shorter” ones in the contemporary Persona series at a mere 60 hours. Persona 5 Royal is a beast, though. Hard to get through that one in under 100 hours without rushing.
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