What games evoked emotions for you? Which ones really hit you in the feels?
For me, in no particular order:
Firewatch
This War of Mine
What Remains of Edith Finch
Gone Home
Papers Please
Doki Doki Literature Club
I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream
Yes!!!! I was hoping someone would have commented this... The sense of just scale and epicness, the loss, and feeling so small. I wanted to keep learning more and more about the story. It doesn't seem like it'd be fun, reading in a game? No shooting? No killing? But it's honestly in my top 3 favorite games of all time. Also Last of Us-- strong feeling of loss in a specific scene in that game.
Good lord, someone turned the Harlan Ellison story into a game...? Savage.
Journey, for me. Nothing has ever even come close to the power it can deliver. Only problem these days is there is some rng involved in actually getting a great experience.
FF6 and FFX also hit pretty hard, in that good old epic jrpg way. TLOU is an easy mention, the way it all comes together.
Suzerain also pulled off a really unique experience. But heavy VN elements are cheating a little bit. Obviously you can hit people in the emotions if you're basically just writing a book. Making me care about a fictional country and its people was a cool trick though.
Rime completely wrecked me. I downloaded it because it looked like a cute fun puzzle game. I was not prepared for the emotional journey it would take me on.
Do they have to be healthy emotions? Because the cutscenes in Chained Echoes made me mad with how long they are. The cutscenes caused me to stop playing the game.
I’ve been trying to get more in to single player games after a decade of multiplayer competitive games (it’s been slow but going! Been playing Death stranding and Hellblade Senyas sacrifice)
But the first ones that came to my mind was Pokémon mystery dungeon explorers of sky, and portal 1/2.