Asklemmy

When i first killed someone in DayZ back in the day, when it was just the ArmA 2 mod and all the hype.

I finally found a gun and started to learn my way around the zombies, when i heard a player in a bush nearby the hospital in Elektrozavodsk. I thought he was probably out to get me, so i emptied my Makarov clip at the bush and shortly after heard the fly noise they had put to mark dead players.

As i searched his body with my heart pumping like crazy i found him to have nothing but a can of beans. I felt profoundly shitty in that moment because he was just like me at the time. Some new guy playing a tough sandbox multiplayer-game, where everything and everyone can kill you. He probably didnt even hear or see, where he got killed from, just like it happened half a dozen times to me before.

I showed cruelty to someone in whose shoes i'd had demanded mercy.

Fuck everyone pitching people to fight each other

Kind of feels disparate from it being a video game, but it's difficult to really make this experience another way:

I wanted to play a healer in an MMO. It was a shitty MMO, so healers could only be female characters wearing skimpy armor.

Well, it took about half a minute until I had people walk up to me, to then just stop 3 meters away. From the way they were moving, I have to assume, they were working their cameras to look underneath my skirt, and probably doing so with only one hand.

Some of them were sending me "hello :)" messages, which I guess is basic decency, if you're going to use my body, but it felt weird, too, since we had nothing to talk about.

All in all, it felt uncomfortable. And I did not even have to fear for them to start touching or even raping me. Plus, I was able to log out, delete my account and basically just leave all of that behind.

Well, except for one thing I did not leave behind: I do not want to be the other side in that experience either.

SOMA left me questioning my own consciousness, what it is to be human, and loneliness.

That moment in Papers, Please where they say they're reassigning the guards, and issue you a rifle with three shots in a locked drawer in your desk. And you're doing your paperwork, and there's a siren, you look up and a guy is hopping the fence. You scramble to get the gun out and shoot him but he already threw the bomb.

It's kind of amazing how immersive that moment was. The panicked scramble to take in what was going on, know what to do, scramble for the key, line up and shoot someone.

Look I've shot a lot of people in video games. Mowing down nazis, taking the gluon gun to HECU marines, I've probably shot Heavy Weapons Guy in the face 900,000 times over the decades, just him.

But that one got me. In that deliberately low res game about border crossing paperwork, that one made me feel like I actually just killed someone.

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.

This will date me, Missile Commander. When you lose the game doesn't reset, you had to reset it. So if you don't you just see dead cities on a screen, with silence. This was right about the same time I saw War Game. The only wining more is not to play.

WoW: ill never forget it. This was BC expansion and as a Druid I had just recently unlocked flight as part of a huge questline. I was hopping around mining nodes farming for my Jeweler profession when I encountered a Druid nightelf. They had the upgraded bird form (320% speed vs 60%). I must have pissed this guy off or he was bored but he was just stalking me. Eventually he starts fighting me and we had a substantial level difference. I think he was 70 and I was 60. He was going to kill me but eventually I escaped out of combat into bird form. Of course he's several times faster than I am. I had a sliver of health and a single moonfire would've killed me. I am just holding down space bar.. Climbing into the sky. He fires off his moon fire. It should have killed me, but as luck would have it my headpiece gem had a 1% chance to reflect a spell. I had to read the combat logs to figure out what happened, but the spell hit him. The damage caused him to lose bird form and as he was now in combat he plummeted to his death. I landed. Danced around his corpse and went on my way. I could not believe what had just happened.

When I was 13 a friend of mine and I spent the whole summer after swimming at the trailer park pool playing Super Mario 3 until we beat it. We did a deep study of the game together and beat it together. First platform I ever beat and first gay sex I ever had to help me out in the orientation department. 1988 was a nice year for me. I haven't lived in a trailer park ever since, but the community swimming pool was nice.

Disco Elysium was full of such moments for me. Here's one:

You spend a lot of time in the game basically talking to yourself and your inner voices, and one of these voices is volition. If you put enough points into it, it'll chime in when you're having an identity crisis or struggling to keep yourself together and it'll try to cheer you up and keep you going. At the end of Day 1 in the game you, an amnesiac cop, stand on a balcony in an impoverished district reflecting on the day's events and trying to make sense of the reality you've woken up into with barely any of your memories intact. If you pass a volition check, it'll say the following line:

"No. This is somewhere to be. This is all you have, but it's still something. Streets and sodium lights. The sky, the world. You're still alive."

This line in combination with the somewhat retro Euro setting, the faint lighting, and the sombre-yet-somewhat-upbeat music was very powerful. The image it painted was quite relatable for me. I just sat there for a minute staring at the scene and soaking it all in. Even though this is a predominantly text-based game with barely any cinematics/animations, I felt a level of immersion I had rarely, if ever, experienced before.

Oh, look at that. Someone actually made a volition compilation. 😀 This video will give you a better idea of what I'm describing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENSAbyGlij0 Minor spoilers alert!

I have a lot of these moments but I'll pick my top ones.

Crystalis on the NES. When the town of Shyron gets destroyed and characters you know and care about are killed. Left me in shock as a 10 year old kid. And the temple music when you enter the pyramid is hauntingly beautiful too. I hum that tune to my kids as a lullaby.

Mass Effect 1. Exploring the planets left me in awe. For the time, the atmosphere and lore was detailed, rich, and very well thought out. Then facing down a reaper in the third game, it all made me feel so small.

FF7. Aerith getting killed took me by complete surprise. My brother and I were stunned for a while. Just sat there pondering wether it was real or not.

Minecraft back in beta. The world was just so impossibly huge and you're all alone with your creations. Left me feeling very small. The more I built, the emptier it felt.

Finally, Mad Max on the PS4. The first time I got hit by a storm I was in awe. The world is just so well built and detailed. The whole game/movie universe is filled with amazing culture that's just done really, really well.

Brothers: A tale of two sons. Not a unique experience, as it almost seems like the whole point of the game is this one moment. So, spoilers.. Its control scheme is each analogue stick independently controls your two characters, two brothers. And it's a fun puzzle game where you have to resolve moving two characters at once in this way, moving, balancing, timing. It's all fun and games until a tragedy, the older brother dies. He was one of your control sticks, now for the rest of the game half your controller is dead also. And you walk back out of the cave past all the puzzles you did with your brother, which are made for two people. You're useless, and the feeling of loss is staggering.

Subnautica...when I was so immersed that I went too deep...didn't have enough time to return to the surface to breathe...and then looked up in anguish and saw that dreaded refraction "circle" hundreds of meters above you... THE DEEP HAS YOU, THERE IS NO ESCAPE

Outer Wilds, like all of it. Falling into the black hole made me actually scream in terror, then shiver for how small being away from the solar system makes you feel. Also the quantum moon, and that ending holy fuck

Playing Outer Wilds, spoilers ahead:

::: Minor Outer Wilds spoilers I was trying to see how far into space I could get before the time loop restarted. As I flew away, I aimed my signalscope back towards the solar system and listened to all the instruments play together. Then when the supernova hit, one by one, the instruments were silenced. :::

That game is full of so many great moments of discovery and realization in that game, I wish I could play it for the first time again.

Playing Elite Dangerous a few years back, I bought this little jerry-rigged thing called an ED Tracker. It's an Arduino with some accelerometers and a magnometer, basically the same sensors as a Wiimote, and it tracks yer 'ed. Much cheaper than TrackIR or other commercial solutions. Strap it onto some headphones or a hairband and with some software it models itself as a joystick, so I could look around the cockpit and target things I looked at, as well as look to the side to pop up ship and navigation menus. But the best bit was flying around a station with an orbital ring. I matched my velocity and pitched down slightly, then looked up at all the habitat areas. The graphics weren't perfectly amazing, but the sensation of just flying around in 3D and seeing everything was so overwhelming I actually had to stop playing for a few minutes. It was the kind of thing I'd dreamed of video games letting me do since I was a small child.

I tried a Satisfacfory playthrough while on drugs, and somewhere in the upgrade tiers I fixed my brain. I can just decide what I want to focus on now. I was never able to do that before.

Dragon Age origins.

Exceptional writing and I walked right into it just expecting a cool fantasy game. I got hit with my first experience of in game romances, the shock of betrayal, the sacrifices... It was such a brilliant experience. Makes me really, really want to play it again now.

I argue that someone's first Dark Souls run gives a viewer a great understanding of a person's true personality and how they deal with difficult problems. Like watching my stubborn friend grind out fighting the titinite deamon by the blacksmith for 3 hours with an unupgraded spear really illistrated how stubborn he can be but also the dedication for self improvement. Your playthrough can also be self reflective. I found that I am quick to search for loopholes or cheese strats on hard bosses rather than put in the reps to learn it properly. I noticed I did the same thing in classes. Not cheating, but more like finding tricks and short cuts to make it work now rather than polishing basic skills and getting a deep understanding of the problem.

Was very eye opening to me and made me realize that how and what someone plays can tell you alot about a person.

Undertale: You've progressed through most of the game. You didn't strike out at the monsters. You've done everything you could to avoid hurting those around you and yet strive for escape. Over and over You've been put up against a wall with your enemies striving to end you. You could fight back, you could react to this world of monsters and become like them, a monster.

But you didn't. You stand before a mirror in a house very similar to the one you were in at the start of the game. Looking into the mirror, you are affirmed.

"Despite everything. It's still you."

Despite everything I've gone through. Despite the hunger and gnawing to give in. To respond to the hatred and harm that has been inflicted on me with fury and bloodlust equal to the twisted delight others have taken in my suffering. I didn't give in. I didn't lose my joy in making others smile. I didn't give up my interests and the rare and disparate moments of joy.

Despite everything. It's still me. I'm still here. I'm not a monster.

The first spacewalk in Prey 2017. It's incredible. You get out of the gate, look around, see nothing but space around you, hear No Gravity playing (this track is extremely important), and realize how tiny and insignificant you really are. You barely understand how to control your character, everything is clunky, you seem to be in danger from everything around you. It's a perfectly directed moment.

I played Gris on a lot of LSD and bawled my fucking eyes out at the end

No Man's Sky. The first time I got to a spaceship, flew out of the planet into space seamlessy. And then, again seamlessly, landing to another planet. It still amazes me, but nothing beats the first time.

And the one, the only original FF VII. The death of Aeris. Yes, I'm that old.

The ending of the Tiny Tina dlc for Borderlands 2. How do kids deal with death? Well, it isn't easy.

Disco Elysium is so fucking wild. It's the most empathetic game I've ever played. I am someone who has an easy time putting myself in other people's shoes. The character is an alcoholic mess, on the brink of a depression so deep he has totally fractured his own memory and sense of self. He's a genius. He's also an idiot. And he's a cop/detective in a world that really despises cops. It's what I would call the idealistic cop: the one that would put themself between a group of armed men and a group of innocent people with nothing but a dinky pistol and say stand down.

Anyway, I love how it makes me feel about everything in its place. The ideologies that drive us. The youth we waste on fooling around. The insanity and, somehow, the humor of racism. The mistakes that make us who we are. The idealistic pursuits that are so high they can never be achieved. How heartbreak never goes away.

Most importantly, I played a game with an internal monologue built-in as the RPG system, and it nearly exactly matches how I think and feel. My mind is also fractured as identifiable pieces of myself. I gave some parts of them names because it made it easier to separate the thoughts from how I truly felt. I have nearly all the same psyches just with different names from Volition, Half-light, etc. And it floored me. I have never played a game that was as introspective as I was. Right down to the simultaneously protective and self destructive thoughts clashing within and one winning out. It gave me a third person perspective of my own self destructive and unhealthy thought processes. And it helped me love myself a little bit more. I feel like I'll never be able to play anything like it again for the rest of my life.

The ending of Mirror's Edge.

Really good final level, finally freeing the protagonist's younger sister at the last minute as big emotional conclusion, a beautiful view of the city at night from atop a skyscraper, a burning helicopter falling down the glass walls, and then this f*cking beautiful music starts to play! It just all came together.

Celeste.

Hard retro platformer with amazing musical themes that persist throughout the whole game.

The main character has anxiety, which another character helps them deal with by imagining a floating feather that your breath controls. Slow, long breaths in and out to keep the feather balanced.

The game has an evil entity pursue you intermittently, and all you can do is run.

The feather actually appears on screen and you try to make it slowly move up and down to calm down. It was a great tool that is actually used IRL to deal with anxiety.

When the character is being chased, the entity makes you panic, so the character tries to calm down and the feather comes back on screen. The entity slashed through that feather and mocks you for trying.

What a gut punch that was.

0.000% of Communism has been built. Evil child-murdering billionaires still rule the world with a shit-eating grin. All he has managed to do is make himself sad. He is starting to suspect Kras Mazov fucked him over personally with his socio-economic theory. It has, however, made him into a very, very smart boy with something like a university degree in Truth. Instead of building Communism, he now builds a precise model of this grotesque, duplicitous world.

I had to stare at the window for an hour afterwards.

When knuckles helps you in sonic 3&K (yes I'm old)

That dragon, cancer.

A linear story about having a child and loving him and knowing you will lose him to a cancer he is too young to fend off. Based on the devs son.

Utterly heartbreaking, makes you hug your kids.

Nothing as profound as what you described there...
But... The Last Of Us was an experience for me...

I hadn't played a "new" game in about 8-10 years at that point, so the huge increase in development was mind blowing to me.
But really, the intensity of the story is what really did it for me. I legit got teary eyed in the intro, and then the burning restaurant scene made me ball my eyes out..

Phenomenal fucking game

Or, to bring it back to my youth... The Illusion of Gaia was probably the first game I played that made me feel things. That was so long ago, and I was so young when that came out that being specific about it is hard. But I think I really related with the main character, and I remember really feeling things during the lost-at-sea raft scene.

I might need to go find the ROM now...

**Or, to go a bit further back, Dragon Warrior.
That was the first game I ever played that really captivated me. It was the first RPG I ever played, and even tho the storyline is incredibly basic and cliche, it was the first time I experienced a story at all in a video game. It's definitely the reason that I prefer fantasy RPGs over every other type of game

It's kinda cheating but The Beginners Guide is a game I think about all the time. As someone who makes things, the themes it explores about validation and the purpose for creating art really hit home.

For just a profound moment, the sun station in Outer Wilds.

Kentucky Route Zero came to me at a shaky time in my life. Such that it was full of impactful moments. Maybe made more so by myself living in the often grim, beautiful and haunted place that is east Kentucky -and of course late stage capitalism.

Orchids to Dusk is another that inspires awe. Though it is entirely about looking for a nice place to die.

Shuaaan! Shuaaaan! Shuaaaaaaaaaan!

I beat mgs2 when i was like 14 and I just sat at the end of my bed and pondered for like 3 hours before moving again

MGS 2

also MGS 1, but the ending of MGS2 👀

Old-ass example: Zelda: Majora's Mask. Waiting for the mooncrash with Anju, Kafei showing up at the last minute, and them telling Link to save himself and leave them to die together. It was the first time I saw tragic beauty in a medium I mostly knew for either childlike joy or gleeful violence (depending on if the game was E or M rated lmao)

Newish example: Towards the latter half of Supergiant Games' Pyre, as it becomes clear that the stars are going out, and only a few will get to leave the Downside, and the entire team is looking downcast and they turn to you, their reader, the crippled scholar who would never be able to ascend due to being unable to partake in the games of magic basketball, but who had guided them this far, for guidance. And the game just lets you -- Write the speech you'll give to your friends. I had never seen a game do anything of the sort. My jaw was on the floor.

Echoes of the Eye expansion to Outer Wilds. I managed to avoid all the spoilers, watched some playthroughs but thankfully didn't study them too closely. Importantly, the streamers never looked "up" during the parts of the gameplay that I've seen, so to me it appeared just like another normal environment (well, normal at least by Outer Wilds standards). I already loved the original game, and decided I must play this for myself.

So when I entered through that doorway for the first time I was genuinely stunned. "You fuckers, you really did it this time. You actually went ahead and did it!" I mean...

The end of Half Life 2, and the end of Far Cry 2.

Obligatory FF7...

There's an old PS 1 game called Legend of Dragoon... not too bad of a game but probably gameplay wise doesn't hold up. BUT... its basically you getting a team of heroes from several the surviving races after another race (the only one who could naturally use magic) decided to do a genocide against everybody (and lost badly).

There is a scene later in the game, where you're in the ruins of a floating city that (I think) was the capital of the genociders. It is a barren husk of a place, devoid of all sentient life, there are no survivors of this race. However, some of the their machines were made with magic and are running on autopilot. There is a room where you can just hang out and watch these little flying robot things zip around and have scripted NPC dialogue where rules/laws are submitted and passed.

It was this weird example of the banality of evil that I don't think I've come across in a game before or since.

Walking into Leyndell in Elden Ring for the first time realizing this might be the greatest game of all time.

When I was younger, I had really only experienced console games and maybe a few basic PC games at school. My uncle showed my this FPS game on his computer called Redneck Rampage. Basically you're running around farms trying to kill aliens. I don't really remember playing very many FPS game before that and it opened up a whole new world for me. But the really crazy part was how "adult" the game was. You could drink beer in the game and your character would get drunk. I also remember some graffiti in the game of a naked woman with huge tits. At the time I could not believe something like that would be allowed in a video game! Blew my mind.

Witcher 3. Spoilers here, btw.

I will never forget riding my horse up to The Baron's residence after losing his child and his wife and seeing him hanging from the tree. They do such a good job making his character barely tolerable at first, then make him slowly grow on you after you learn he's just like you. Scared, confused, and lost. He lashes out because he's trying to protect his family, but the weight of losing it is the end is too much for him.

Truly, what a masterclass in narrative design, and it's only a sliver of what that game has to offer.

Nier automata had that moment for me. At first I was pissed, just getting another playthrough with slightly different mechanics... But that quickly wore off when i realized how much more depth that second pass was adding to the story.

Then, with the full context at the climax of the first half, I cried... Where the red fern grows and that are the only two pieces of media that hit me that deep.

Then, when things are getting all jrpg-ending crazy and i thought I would get nothing but a bit more lore and maybe another death scene, they did it again, but different. The climax floored me, as again things I had long accepted as just slightly mysterious, but mostly explained, backdrop (it's set post extinction after all) clicked into place again and I just sat there in awe. There was a mystery you had to work to understand, and multiple big twists leading to the finale...

It was already a good, complete story. I thought we were done. But then the final piece clicks into place, and everything I already knew intimately (I messed up one ending before I looked up the ones I was missing, but otherwise 100%d it).

Now the world had another layer of implication, which peeled away another, and another. I just sat in shock as the story changed over and over, as I thought through the story I'd played through again and again. The hints are everywhere from the beginning, but it's all cycles within cycles, growing bigger and faster with every new layer of recontextualizaion

It gave you the time to reel from the impact let it sink in... You sit there, your mind blank, in awe of how the game gently planted one tiny bomb at a time throughout the experience, and despite dropping bombs the whole time, they managed to remain unexploded. Then the final one hits just right, and the next explodes. Around and around it goes, blasting away what you thought was the dirt the experience sat on. It reveals this beautiful mural, only for the explosions to destroy it to reveal another, and another... Usually following the thread of the story, but occasionally cutting across the familiar timeline.

So you're in awe at how a game could make you feel all this, just in shock

Then the last cutscene gently draws your eyes back into focus. A slow and melancholy scene plays, and it's like viscerally grasping the size of the sun, only to turn around and see the Milky Way... All of this was just one bead in an endless chain. And before you can taint that emotionally deep but intellectually worthless moment by thinking too hard on it, it starts the credits.

It's an extremely difficult but very simple asteroid , and you finally die, but respawn right away. There's no counter, no punishment, no reward, but you start to see how long you can survive... It doesn't require much thought or strategy, it just keeping you just occupied enough that you can't let your mind wander. Then another ship appears and it changes nothing, but one after another appears, and suddenly the tides are being beat back by the sheer number of other ships firing alongside you. It crescendos and fades gently.

And then, in this raw and disoriented state, the game gives you a question. Sacrifice your save, and you can join the wave of fellow players who helped make that tiny desert mint of a feeling of connectedness when others finish off the experience.

It's a meaningless sacrifice - that last minigame wasn't really that special, and the game can't be lost. At that moment, my game save was so emotionally important to me, and plenty others had already made that little sacrifice - mine would do nothing. I might pick the game back up - I still had one more ending, and I'd have to do it all again to get the final two achievements anyways. I'd come back and finish again, and I'd take the other path, completing the journey. Not now - I just combed through every inch of the world, trying to squeeze every last collectible dry to extend the end a little more. But this was my first completion, this one should be the trophy.

I'm ashamed of that moment when I said no. The trophy was as meaningless to me as the sacrifice would have been to future players... But I now understand that little symbolic sacrifice wasn't about them, it was about me.

The final act of the game came years later, when the details had faded. I had tried to pick it up a few times, but there's another genius part of the game - the intro ship sequence is terrible. It's very long, and slow, and there's no checkpoints. If I hadn't just paid for the game, and was just shown that this was just a minigame, I would've refunded it immediately. It doesn't respect your time, it doesn't offer story, it's not really challenging, but although it's very easy, you do have to focus and play it - the instant death is very easy to avoid, but even letting yourself get hit to see what happens means a couple of minutes of nothing. You realize it's the perfect mirror of the ending, your squad is stripped away until you're incredibly strong but alone, the enemies few but will kill you if you don't try. It's 100x worse after completing the game once - you already know what happens, you know you have to do it at least once more to reach the end again, and there's no anticipation of a new world - you still could draw it out from memory because while it's small. It feels big initially because of how you run around in circles as it changes around you, but going back...I finally finished the into, looked around, and closed the game.

A tried again with the same result, but a couple years ago I finally felt sure it was time! I forced myself through the intro, blazed through the story, repeated the into again. I found I'd collected most of the weapons and was gearing up effortlessly... And as I ran it through again, I saw the cracks. The textures had aged, they looked terrible now. Invisible walls are everywhere. The combat system is tight, but easy once learned. It's not hard. The main obstacle is slow moving balls with obvious patterns. The weapons each have different patterns to learn, but I knew them still. I could blaze through it with any combination of gear... But I had a goal, and I wasn't going to just give it up again. I'd never again play what for years I'd written essays about how it was possibly the most well crafted game ever made. Nothing else has ever made me feel so much

And finally, I got to the moment that made me cry, and I felt nothing. The game sucked. I played through half the next section on autopilot, getting to the part I remembered less clearly... And I put the controller down. Again I felt shame at not sacrificing my save. I came to terms with the fact that doing it now would mean nothing.

And this is the final cycle. Every time someone asks about the best game ever, I say it's Nier: Automata. Because none of it is on accident. It was meant to taste like dirt in your mouth when you came back to make that sacrifice like you promised yourself.

:::Spoiler:::The pacing of the reveal of 4a's assignment, to kill 2b when she learns too much, doesn't hit again. When you learn this specific 4a had killed her before, and when he tries to sacrifice himself to save her, or at least so he won't have to kill her again, or when she ends up dying to save him... These moments can only be had once, even if the details fade.:::

.I don't recommend this game anymore - it's a masterpiece of pacing and tying up your emotions in knots only to pull it loose at the right moment - the pacing doesn't work anymore, all media is faster now. It cant be remastered or revamped, the story itself isn't that good

It's a trancedent experience, or it's trash - balanced on the knifes edge purposely. It can only be experienced once, by an active game who has never played more modern games, or it doesn't hit at all.

It changed be as a person, and I think of it often. I will sacrifice so much more now, because it made me understand - when everyone comes together and achieves something impossible, it's not all the same if the result doesn't change. Your sacrifice doesn't really matter much to the result if they have enough, but the you that made that symbolic sacrifice is so much greater than the one who held back.

Baldur's Gate 3. Karlach's reaction once you kill Gortash. One of the few times I've ever really respected a videogame's writing and voice acting on a serious level.

In Rain World interacting with Moon especially if you don't know what is going on then go back once you can communicate with her.