Games, books and movies don’t change your life. At most it makes you think about something a little deeper. A little longer.

Life events change your life. A child. Death. Life. Love. Hate. War. Hope. Loss. Peace. Safety. Destruction. And money. Or lack of.

The most impactful game I played, which story I still really remember after 25 years? Homeworld. Hiigara. Our home.

Omori, not much to add, it was the first game to give me goosebumps, or only game so far, and truly feel sad

System Shock 2 - The only game to have truly scared me. This was one of the first games that I played when I switched to PC gaming since my HP Pavillion at the time couldn’t play a lot of the newer games. The rest was history

Deus Ex - This game still informs much of my world view

Thief 1 and 2 - While SS2 scared me in absolute terms, Thief gave me a sense of dread and isolation coupled with amazing stealth mechanics

Skyrim - My gateway to RPGs

GTA 4 - SA was my introduction to the series and, while I enjoyed very much, 4 was just blew me away.

Planescape: Torment - The most beautifully crafted RPG ever

Fallout 2 - I’ll be honest: I only played and beat the first two Fallouts just this year but, man, do I wish I played them sooner. FO2 in particular change my relationship with the series.

Undertale. That was the game that really changed my life. I never did complete the bad ending route because that game is my comfort game, and it made me want to be friends with the world. I was kind of a jerk in middle school and highschool, but Undertale, which I played in my Junior year made me feel so guilty about who I was being. I think it also saved me from going down the rightwing extremist pipeline because of how much it touched me. I thank Undertale for making my life better.

Deltarune also means so much to me.

Disco Elysium

Half-Life 2. It brought me into PC gaming, as well as introducing me to Garry’s Mod, a relatively simple sandbox tool for creativity, complete with a wide array of assets to use.

I also really appreciate its moody world design that doesn’t often explain things directly to you.

I’m getting old so there have been a few.

Super Mario World (SNES) - my first video game and the reason I eventually wanted to learn about computers

Final Fantasy VIII - my parents accidentally bought this for me instead of VII that I asked for. It was not a good impact, it was during formative years of my life and I looked up to the broody/loner main character and tried to emulate him, but in real life that just made me act an asshole and be lonely

World of Warcraft - this was probably an addiction and took too much of my college life. Haven’t played an MMO since I quit. Still reminisce about it.

SimCity 4 - forced me to think about systems, which I think indirectly shaped my career path

Kerbal Space Program - made orbital mechanics intuitive and made me interested in all things space

It was segmented so it wasn’t really at the ending for battlefield one but the beginning that has fucked me up for a long time. The game opens to a black screen, utter silence, and a description prints out of how wide and brutal the first world world war was. The last text that appears on the screen was, “What you are about to experience is front line combat. You are not expected to survive.”

What they were describing was that they didn’t expect you to play one character and that you should be dying to respawn in a new section of the map with new features. This was the most accurate depiction of the war possible, even if it was just meant to describe the mechanics of the level. It went further! Every time you died they showed a real name of a real soldier that lost their life in the war and their birth and death date. Most of these ages are under the age of 24.

After the final death, it plays a cut scene where two soldiers are pointing rifles at each other and they both break down and chose not to kill each other…I believe all of this gameplay and the cut scene are being played off as a PTSD nightmare he’s having while recovering in a hospital…one of those ‘stare at a blank wall and rethink how fucking good our lives are’ moments. Also a deviation to the standard which is having a good guy-winner/bad guy-loser. They instead opted for the “we’re all losing because of this” realization…I don’t think we’ll ever see anything like it again.

Eastern Mind: The Lost Souls of Tong Nou and Planescape Torment. I think both helped me think about death and reincarnation - what would it even mean to have a “soul”? Would it mean some sort of unbroken consciousness, or are we bits and pieces of different segmented ideas and thoughts loosely connected together?

Outer wilds hit that spot for me

Outer Wilds. Unfortunately I can’t elaborate without spoiling it.

RDR2 (PC)

The first one - Planescape: Torment.

The second one (accidentally): Baldur’s Gate 3.

Accidentally, because I fell in love with the characters so much that I started watching the actors’ streams on Twitch and learned that I probably have ADHD.

Deus Ex

Braid.

The game itself is brilliant. The story and message within is heartfelt, heartbreaking, and un-apologetically autobiographical. Up until that point, I knew gaming was a good storytelling medium, but not for something this moving.