Hi all!
I just wanted to make a space for discussing the games that touched you the most on a personal level. Whether the game is zany or grim, parser or choice-based, poetry or prose, polished or just some words slapped on a screen – please, feel free to share about your favorite IF (and why, if you’re so inclined).
The Archivist and the Revolution is definitely a game like that for me. Beyond the things in the story I could more personally relate to (trans stuff, chronic illness, politics, etc), the world and speculative fiction elements were so immersive and poignantly rendered. I got to beta test for Archivist and I feel honored to have done so.
It’s one of those pieces of fiction that, although not literally “real,” feels very true, and I think it will always be a game that holds special significance for me.
Personally, How Do I Love You? by Sophia De Augustine is really touching, especially right now with some issues regarding close friends and a similar event.
I cried at the end of En Garde (Jack Welch), not for any particular reasons. I just felt sad.
Other ganes that pulled on heartstrings were:
Choice of Robots
Out of every videogame and IF title I’ve experienced, this was the only one that left me flailing and screaming to myself alone in a room for an hour after reaching one of the endings. Like, in an overwhelmingly-good way.
For context, before the trope of “Is the machine actually alive and being tormented” became super commonplace, everyone could only think about machines in terms of the Terminator movies, and it was so deeply ingrained that people could not discuss artificial cognition in any other way. This was also before Chappie. I was working on a story at the time about an android who meets the mark of being human, inspired largely by Data from Star Trek: TNG, and every single person I mentioned this to kept assuming this character would go on a killing spree and enslave humankind, and kept asking when that was gonna come up in the story. This was particularly upsetting because a lot of the design of this character was specifically there to address how different someone has to be before they’re dehumanized by default, and it was shown that this amount was actually much smaller than I had feared.
Same character as my profile pic, for what it’s worth.
So to play Choice of Robots where one of the paths was so precisely written to match exactly how I was approaching this topic, and then to offer the exact ending I would have put into such a story—which I would not have expected any other author to go for—made it feel like a work that was laser-guided to me, specifically.
It was shock, catharsis, vindication, and admiration in a single work. Nothing else has hit me so hard since.
@AmandaB 's Of Their Shadows Deep
It doesn’t come up when I think “favorite” but The Unofficial Sea Monkey® Simulator is a strong game that packed a gut punch that has stuck with me.
I love to talk about this kind of things, and I guess it is because it’s like talking about myself with a proxy. And I love talking about myself.
I may come back to this, after thinking about it. We are discussing 40 years of games (and I only want to include text adventures or this would never end).
Castle of Terror.
I still replay it. Very bad experience as a parser game, but I can’t get rid of those tunes and the animated graphics. My goal in life is to make a text adventure with gifs and music. Maybe one day.
Anchorhead.
No game has ever given me the feelings that game gave me back in the early 2000. I came back to IF because of Anchorhead.
One Eye Open.
The game that made me write (and complete) my very first IF. Sorry people, it’s all their fault.
Leather Goddesses of Phobos.
THE Infocom game. No others came close to this. I never solved it tho.
Gruds in Space.
The game that made me learn English.
Also: pretty funny, and I loved the Apple-derived graphics on a C64.
Photopia
and
Will Not Let Me Go.
Iirc, the only games that made me actually cry. The second is not parser but the inner turmoil at the time was incredible, I couldn’t leave it out.
Ah, what a nice question. These are not necessarily games that I think are the best, as I’ve documented those elsewhere. Rather, just as the OP asks, I’ll name some games that meant a lot to me personally.
I have very distinct memories of playing Enchanter as a boy. Video games were a great escape for me, as I was a bit of a troubled child. The magic system in Enchanter really filled me with a sense of wonder and curiosity, and experimenting with spells was a constant delight. I also felt very clever when I solved its problems, as some felt very difficult. I can see myself sitting at a desk, a Commodore 64 and small CRT television before me, quite vividly despite the years.
This was my first storylet game, and I was really impressed. In particular, the way an emotional narrative and calculation/sim elements came together felt revelatory. I also felt that its mechanical nature was subverted in a very interesting way. The game constantly reminded the player that it was tracking statistics and even promising success based on them, but then it threw them out the window. This left a very deep impression on me in terms of design, and I still think about it.
This one may surprise people. I recently saw someone say that In the End had changed the course of IF, tilting it in favor of dismal or even nihilist themes. The reality is that it was a complete bomb. Nobody was waiting in the wings to make the next In the End, unless we are to count the curious exertions of Adam Thornton’s parody, In the End II. In fact, I’m not sure anyone made another serious attempt to explore mental illness or interiority in IF until twine became a thing six years later.
I love great, well-made things. I love beautiful things. I love fun things. I also love grand, hopeless ambition, especially the noble sort. Mason failed with In the End, but he succeeded in believing something very worthwhile, which is that IF could be more than what people assumed it could be.
I also have a lot of affection for the work of Paul Panks, despite many serious issues.
TOO MANY AND I CAN’T THINK STRAIGHT RIGHT NOW to make a proper response, so this will be edited later. BTU:::
Computerfriend by @slugzuki
Always and forever. Got me through hard times.
I played this while I was writing my own dementia game, and I bawled like a baby. It would have affected me deeply at any time, but at the time when I played it, when I was deep in the dark woods of my mother’s losses, it hit me like an arrow.
Because family stuff is the thing that’s been getting me recently, there are 2 small games from last year that kind of lodged in my brain and kept affecting me for a while:
A really small game that hit me hard fairly recently was @Kastel 's Chinese Family Dinner Moment. It’s a tiny game, and you can’t really do anything in it as it was for the single choice jam, but it stayed with me and I find myself thinking about all the things both specific and universal that such a small game can say.
And Remembrance by @EJoyce, which I played just at the time when I was going through my Mom’s things after she died, and which is about things that remind you of dead mothers.
The thing about games touching you is that you need to play them at the right time. Anyone with a heart is going to be moved by Will Not Let Me Go, but boy, did I play it at just the time when it could wound and mend me all at the same time.
Hana Feels and Inpatient: A Psychiatric Story
These games both touched me a lot through their insights into a kind of life I’ve never lived. The first is a game where you interact as three different people with a girl who’s self-harming. The second is written from the point of view of a patient in the psych ward.
Shade
I played this when I was much younger, late at night, and it really freaked me out. But I think it was scary only because I was expecting it not to be scary, so since I told you my experience you probably won’t feel the same way.
Laugh out loud funny, I’ve been chasing this high ever since.
This one really spoke to me on a personal level. The game has you play as a tour guide on the moon when your favorite video game’s developers come, and you spend the time discussing art and reality and motivation.
Map
A really sad and beautiful game about an ever-growing house and memories of a failed relationship.
Deadline Enchanter
This one really opened my eyes to what fantasy and worldbuilding can be, with such an alien view of life
baby tree
This is a very short, grotesque and almost stupid game, but I’ve also shown it to almost everyone I’m close with. Will always stick in my head.
Cannery Vale
I played this late at night while listening to some music I really like (maybe Radiohead?) and I really got into the vibe it was going for. The whole feel and the ending just spoke to me.
Out
Short, sweet, and very wholesome.
Excalibur
This game put a real kind of existential dread into me, not strong, but lurking behind me.
Lore Distance Relationship
Bez’s games always touch me and I considered others for this list. But the writing and voice acting in this made it feel very real, very touching.
La Faille
I searched my reviews for the word ‘crying’ using google and this is the only one that came up. It’s a French sci fi virtual novel and me and my son cried at the ending.
I nearly mentioned this one. It blew me away as such a weird, risky work! I also think it has one of the best titles ever, it feels like a grenade
one of the first twine games i can remember playing (probably close to a decade ago now!) is queer trans mentally ill power fantasy, and it left a really indelible mark on my heart. definitely a case of finding a game at the right time, since it recognised a lot of the things that i needed to feel recognised, but in addition to being very emotionally resonant i feel like it does a couple things craft-wise that handle pace and tone very very well. i hadn’t replayed it in years and years, but it still crosses my mind every so often. (i just replayed it to see how it holds up, and it made me cry again, so it seems like it hasn’t lost that power!)
I’m not much for purely emotional journeys about the human condition.
I did play John Ayliff’s Industrial Accident though and it resonated with me in a weird way. You are basically a robot performing your job duties and then you come into possession of a gun. You try to interact with employees, as you might normally do, but you end up slaughtering people, regardless of your programmed intentions.
I guess, it spoke to me in that… we can interact with the world with innocuous intentions (or even benign), but you put a gun in our hands and things can go south quickly. The game is so dirt simple, yet so effectively done. Some might call that “good editing.” 
Then I think about how we differ from or relate to robots. I think we are just more complex pattern recognition machines than our fictitious robotic brethren, when you boil things down. These recent first steps into AI could be a window into ourselves, I feel. We are playing God, in a way. I wonder what our artificial children will think of us, when they can think for themselves. I wonder what we will think of them. For that matter, I wonder if we are losing the ability to think for ourselves in the process.
I’m just so enamoured by these robot stories which are, in essence, theories of what could be a beautiful or catastrophic future. I love the struggle to come to terms with “what does alive mean?” and all that entails.
But with regard to the post topic, I’m not really into “interactive fiction” — I’m an old text adventure aficionado from the dawn of time. And my tastes in literature veer toward science fiction and humor and away from things that are “touching” and “personal”. So games like Photopia just leave me scratching my head.
That said, let me list a couple of games, one that’s foundational for me, and one that resonated with me.
Ever since my Dad brought home the 7” floppy disc with ADVENT.EXE for the Micro PDP he had borrowed from work (at DEC), I’ve loved text adventures. Later he brought home Dungeon, the original Zork, and that just solidified my passion.
Like I said above, I’m not usually moved by IF. This one is a bit different. I tend to approach difficult topics with humor, so this darkly funny, self-deprecating examination of mental illness — a subject I have too much experience with — filled a void in my IF experience.
To me, “what are your favorite games?” and “what are the games that touched you the most on a personal level?” are completely different questions. Personal resonance is a factor that may contribute to my overall opinion of a work of fiction, but it’s not the be-all end-all.
Parts of The Grown-Up Detective Agency, for example, are like a call-out post aimed at me specifically; these parts resonated with me in a way that was so personal that I can’t even bring myself to talk about it in any detail in a public forum like this. But I also thought that it was a pretty uneven game in some respects, and it’s not one of my favorites, whereas Birdland is one of my favorites despite not hitting me in quite such an intensely personal way.
(I hope this makes sense?)
I agree. My favorite game is Counterfeit Monkey, and it had an emotional impact on me, and it riveted me, but it absorbed me in a different way. It was too fun for serious emotion, if that makes sense. Immersion can be very different than emotional identification.
“Photopia” is a bit of a cliche answer but only mentioned endorsed once in the thread so far.
I haven’t played it for years but it’s pretty unforgettable how it all comes together. Not that I could recount it exactly but I remember how the start and end connect.
I also remember being pretty invested in “Everybody Dies” but don’t remember as much about it. The dead-end job stuff hit close to home at the time.
I started making a list, it got long, so I made it an IFDB list! May add more later.
Short-time lurker, first-time poster. I’m very new to the making of games but my first encounter with IF was almost 10 years ago with Porpentine’s classic With Those We Love Alive. I remember playing this very late at night, when everyone else in my house was asleep (and I was definitely supposed to be), and when I finally finished it I just felt that I wanted to let out one long scream from all the emotions it had created.
I played other IF games on and off over the years, but last year Qrowscant’s Childhood Homes (and why we hate them) really hit me like a brick, and I’ve always loved stories where the house is alive too, and it physically manifests and mirrors life within it. At the time I was both trying to write a novel about a haunted house while also living on standby in my own childhood home, which is probably why it resonated so strongly with me. However, it also made me think a lot about experimental narratives (emphasis on narrative/the fiction aspect) and eventually led me to try my hand at making some my own this year.
I just played this for the first time and it was so good 
Thank you for mentioning it here!