My favorite games are Omori, Disco Elysium and Outer Wilds. I cried for hours at the end of those games, and I think the common point in them is high-quality emotional writing and stellar OST (music really affect me) and my attachment to the characters.
I also found that my taste in movies was similar (Hana-bi by Takeshi Kitano is my favorite movie)
I’ve been trying to find something similar, so has anybody any recommendation?
I’d like to add that I basically hated Nier Automata (way too pretentious imo) and Before your Eyes (I wasn’t a fan of the game concept, and found the story pretty weak), and really loved the horror aspects of Omori.
I also heard about To the moon, but games talking about disease are hard for me to enjoy
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Life is Strange made me cry. It has a good soundtrack too.
I played through the original and True colors, it was great!
Play Before The Storm if you haven’t, it’s a prequel to the first game.
I haven’t, will try it!
The first walking dead game from telltale was good, but if you’ve played anything they’ve done its largely the same.
Papers please can get emotional, but it’s mostly intense pressure.
I was so scared for and protective of Clementine.
So good.
But not even a mention of everyone’s favorite character, Kenny?
Kenny will remember that.
I haven’t played it myself, but I’ve seen playthroughs of The Last of Us. Even though there’s a sequel, I’ve heard the first one is better. Anyway, if engaging story is what you’re after, I’d check that out.
I’ve also never played this one, but I’ve heard SpecOps: The Line is also a gutpunch.
It’s a bit of a commitment, but I always found the Halo series to be kinda emotional to me, but then I also grew up with it and got invested in the characters. Your mileage may vary with Halo.
Final recommendation would be Ori and the Blind Forest if you’re into platformers.
Already played through Spec ops the line and loved it, but not as muxh as those other games.
I never played TLOU, might try it out
And yeah Halo wasn’t for me at all
Ori has been also recommended a lot to me but isn’t it hard to get attached to characters with the presentation the game is going for?Yeah, Ori is emotional but there isn’t much to attach you to the characters if that’s what you’re looking for.
Might I recommend Witcher 3? I didn’t play the other ones, but I found myself getting attached to the characters by the end all the same.
Edit: just saw you didn’t care for Witcher 3 much.
The Last of Us can be very intense, and the ending of both 1 and 2 are heart wrenching. I definitely recommend them both. Also take reviews of 2 with a grain of salt. A lot of red pill misogynists hated it.
The Last of Us 1 has been the only game to ever make me emotional. It’s still the gold standard for what a video game is capable of in terms of narrative. The sequel was jarring, but not heart wrenching in the same way the first was.
Haven’t seen Spiritfarer mentioned, worth checking out.
Seconded. Very emotional, and many kinds of emotions.
I’m not super familiar with the examples you gave but I’m gonna say anything from Supergiant Games: Bastion, Transistor, Pyre, Hades. Fantastic music always, I would say the storytelling is done best in Transistor and Hades.
Gotta check Transistor it looks cool af
I thought Ori and the blind Forest was rife with emotion
Ori and the Blind Forest made me shed a few tears. It was a beautiful game that was full of emotion while telling an amazing story.
Ori and the Will of the Wisps made me bawl like a baby for days.
I just finished OneShot this week and I think it could be what you’re looking for. It certainly would if you play the whole game.
You can get very personally attached to the characters in a way that I’ve not had in a game before. It was very hard to finish the game amongst all the tears.
Oneshot looks like it’s what I’m looking for. I’ll try to play it soon! Thank you
You’re welcome, I hope you have a good time!
Just finished the game (and yes it includes solstice) and I loved it! I don’t know if it will be as memorable for me as the other games I mentioned but it was definitely very enjoyable. Thank you! Small note tho, getting some puzzles to work on linux were kind of a pain
Oh wow you got through quicker than I. I’m glad. At least now you’ve met Niko!
I’m not surprised there were Linux issues tbh. With some of the mechanics involved I’m surprised you managed to complete it at all. Truly this might be one of those real unsupported steam deck games if you really want the solstice ending
Niko may be the cutest protagonist Ive ever played. Everything worked really well until the solstice where I had some trouble, stuff like:
spoiler
transparency, and getting _____ to actually run
Thank you! I’ll keep you updated
Brothers a tale of two sons.
It is very emotional
Lots of people recommended it, I’ll look into it
Came in here to mention this.
Easy and fun to play. Totally full of feels
Bastion has a good story and great OST. There’s a pretty heavy moment toward the end of the game.
🎵I’m coming home, sweet home🎵
Transistor too, from the same studio.
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.
I played ff7 crisis core when I was 10 or so… It was wonderful I never heard of Braid
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.
I loved Crisis Core. But Final Fantasy X got me a lot more emotional.
Funnily enough, I own FFX on like three different platforms but still haven’t played it through to the end.
Gris
Ooh, yes! A game without words, but incredibly beautiful.
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.
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.
Woha never heard of that, I’ll look into
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).
Why would it be affected by Chinese censorship? Is it critical of the ccp? Or just because it’s a taiwanese game?
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.
Damn, that’s unfortunate
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.
This War of Mine
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.
Took me over a year to recover from Outer Wilds. Can’t explain it…
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.
Huge RPGs kinda scare me… But Ive heard a lot about Persona 3 that might get me to play it
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.
