The moment that inspired this question:
A long time ago I was playing an MMO called Voyage of the Century Online. A major part of the game was sailing around on a galleon ship and having naval battles in the 1600s.
The game basically allowed you to sail around all of the oceans of the 1600s world and explore. The game was populated with a lot of NPC ships that you could raid and pick up its cargo for loot.
One time, I was sailing around the western coast of Africa and I came across some slavers. This was shocking to me at the time, and I was like “oh, I’m gonna fuck these racist slavers up!”
I proceed to engage the slave ship in battle and win. As I approach the wreckage, I’m bummed out because there wasn’t any loot. Like every ship up until this point had at least some spare cannon balls or treasure, but this one had nothing.
… then it hit me. A slave ship’s cargo would be… people. I sunk this ship and the reason there wasn’t any loot was because I killed the cargo. I felt so bad.
I just sat there for a little while and felt guilty, but I always appreciated that the developers included that detail so I could be humbled in my own self-righteousness. Not all issues can be solved with force.
For me it was playing Life is Strange for the first time. I bought it because it had been listed on Steam as “Overwhelmingly Positive” for ages, and at the time I was really enjoying the story-based games that companies like Telltale were producing. So, knowing nothing about the game, I picked it up and started playing it.
The first act was slow. What I didn’t realize at the time was that the writers were establishing Arcadia Bay, a city in the Pacific Northwest, as a character. All the people in it needed to be recognizable, so it took time for them to teach the player about who they were, what mattered to them, how they fit in to the city, and what their flaws were. I actually stopped playing for a while after the first act. But, luckily, I picked it back up over the holiday season.
I still remember playing it in my living room. I was so thoroughly absorbed into the story that when something tense happened in the second act and I couldn’t stop it the way I normally could, I was literally crushing the controller as if I could make things work by pulling the triggers harder.
I am decidedly not the demographic that Life is Strange was written to appeal to, but they did such a good job writing a compelling story that it didn’t matter. I got sucked in, the characters became important to me, and I could not. put. it. down. I played straight through a night until I finished it.
(If you’ve played it and you’re wondering, I chose the town the first time I played it.)
I’ll never forget that game. I’ll also never forget the communities that spawned around it. I read the accounts of people who had just played it for the first time for about a year because it helped me relive the experience I had when I played it. It was incredible.
Bae>Bay
I won’t play it again, because the story is burned in to my memory exactly how I want to remember it.
Yes, the scene at the end of Act 2 is what hooked me on the series. It’s a shame they didn’t do something similar at the end of Act 1, because so many people stopped playing due to the slow start.
My most profound moment in those games was at the end of The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit. Even though it’s the smallest story in the games, that final dialogue put me through the floor.
When I had to choose at the end, I wound up closing the game and thinking about it for a couple days before finally going back. Bae forever.
Yeah, that was the only game that actually made me cry. I was definitely invested in the story.
For my Life is Strange 2 was so much more impactful. There’s actually multiple endings. A big part of the story is the relationship between the brothers, since I’m an older brother it just hit close. The ending I got was so bittersweet, it wasn’t all happy but it captured the reasoning behind my decisions in the game so we’ll. I was telling myself “this is so sad… but… it’s exactly what I wanted”
There’s also a scene where you can come out of the closet to your dad. I was really blindsided by this, I came out to my parents before, the scene plays out in a really authentic way. I kept pausing the game to mentally process it, and kept rewatching it on YouTube right after. I just couldn’t believe it was real.