[OPEN] Looking for people to whitelist.

Chained Echoes.

I played it thanks to Blaeo and PAGYWOSG. Not that I was never gonna play it. But i didn't delay it as much thanks to them. I had reluctantly entered for this game, cz good reviews. But I used to be someone looked down on pixel games. However this game turned out to be one of the best games I've played. The story, humor, character self awareness, etc really stood out. And the turn based combat was extremely gratifying. Loved it.

The World Ends with You left an indelible mark on my teenage years. I found so much of myself in the protagonist. And recently, I discovered the beautiful worlds of Ori and the Blind Forest (and its sequel) on Game Pass. They were a beacon of light during a rather dark period in my life. It's almost ironic how a story filled with sadness could bring me so much comfort

Hey, and thanks

If I'm being honest about a game that made the most impact on me. Disco Elysium straight-up called me a fence-sitting coward and the most boring cop alive, for going down-the-middle with centrist dialogue options. It genuinely made me look deeper into various political theories and I feel more informed. And I think I'm less afraid to take an actual stance of my own now. In games, and IRL

Pokemon Crystal. Because it was my first finished game :)

Sea of Stars, great RPG reminding of the SNES days.

It's hard to chose one game as there r lots of em that made an impression one way or another. I was gonna say Sekiro or Yakuza 0 or maybe GTA SA and VC but ig it would be God of War. I just played the fork out of that game when I was a kid , I loved the hack and slash gameplay and I didn't have much clue as to what was happening lol. It just made me a sorta kinda gamer. I played the series from PS2 to PSP but didn't continue as I didn't have the newer consoles and now that the new ones coming out to pc I really wanna give em all a replay but that is yet to be as I didn't like playing with K&M ..gots to get a controller :! I rambled ..alot once again ,sry abt that and un hope u r doing phenomenally :))

Chaser. This was one of my first games. It had a lot of different weapons, a wide variety of locations and even slightly different gameplay during the gameplay.

Wolfenstein: The Old Blood is the first one that comes to mind. Listened to the entire OST more than 50 times

Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines. I think this is the first game that made me understand the meaning of immersion. I was really hooked into the world, story and lore, and it also made me lookup about the TRPG it was based on.
It has small secrets tucked in here and there that don't significantly affect the main game, has a lot of interesting characters and I really can go on and on. Of course, there are better games now, but this game gave me fun memories from my younger days.

Hrm, biggest impression. That's similarly tough to "favorite game." I have had lots of big impressions that fade over time.
Horizon Zero Dawn: just a great sense of vastness, and love the tidbits that tell the story.
Planescape Torment: so many different things to read about backstory. Everything had buckets of descriptions, talking about how the planes work, based on the TTRPG sourcebooks.
Disco Elysium: I love how my personality traits are basically fighting with each other to tell me things sometimes. Voice acting os wonderful.
Zelda Echoes of Wisdom: possibly my favorite top down Zelda game. They added so many odd things you could manipulate, and somehow it is lovely, like a 2D envisioning of Zelda BOTW. Finally Zelda gets a proper game.
Harvest Moon on handheld: so different from everything else I played at the time. I mean, Stardew is better, but this made the impression first.
Tetris and Columns: so much learning to love dropping/matching games from these. Go play Hot Wax now. https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?pid=hotwax-5
Bastion: I could listen to that guy narrate all day. Game was okay, but man, narrator.
Guitar Hero: did you know if you play long enough, the world in the middle of your vision starts to swim upwards when you stop watching the note track.
Space Channel 5: thank you Space Michael! Chu chu chu!
Kings Quest, Zork, Monkey Island, Leisure Larry (quite an impression to a 13 year old :D), Tempest 2000, Tekken 1/2, Atari Combat, etc etc

I can only think of one game I did not play at least a little bit within a few weeks of winning it ... and it's because it's in the middle of a series and I haven't gotten a chance to get the rest of the series yet. Otherwise I meet all of your requirements. The "fairly active" part is arguable but I am trying, just money and time are a little tight right this moment.

I usually play games as an escape from reality, so "making a big impression" is usually not really what I'm looking for. However, if I have to pick something, I would say Frostpunk. There are a lot of choices beyond just where to place buildings for maximum effect, and sometimes you have to ask yourself if you're taking things too far. As far as you know, you're the last of all civilization. Do you prevent people from leaving, knowing they will die, but that means they're effectively prisoners? Do you force children to work because you have a shortage of workers and aren't going to get any more? And that's without getting into the whole religion thing. My most recent playthrough, only 4 people died, and they were all people who either had an accident on the job or were already sick before they happened upon my settlement... but did I go too far in preventing deaths? I effectively turned my entire settlement into a giant concentration camp. Wake up early, work 12 hour days, eat gruel which has been "stretched" with sawdust, force the children to work (although I restricted them to "safe" jobs like in the medical building or as engineering apprentices), establish a state religion, force everybody to attend church, not allow anybody out after curfew, set up guard stations literally everywhere (there was no place in my settlement that was not covered), shut down any and all negative speech, etc. Humanity survived with minimum casualties ... but at what cost?

Super Hexagon. Amazing how such a simple game can be so addicting, how many different emotions it can make you feel, and how immensely satisfying it can be to beat it.

It's 100% Portal 2. Made me fall in love with puzzle games. I never find a game that good. Only a couple that comes near to it but never the same. Its funny story, characters that worth to remember and magnificent puzzle mechanics. The game is that good i played the story mode several times and maybe hundreds of fan made levels. Every time i play a puzzle game portal comes to my mind and i say need to play again. The best puzzle game that ever made. Fan mods are great too btw. I tried to play every one of side storylike games that people made with it. That's the game changed my perspective to what i really want to play.

It will be an unpopular choice, but Crusader Kings 3. The endless possibility to create epic stories is just intriguing

I can't promise to play the games I win in a timely manner due to time constraints. That being said, I've lately been trying to make an effort to make time for hobbies as far as I can afford, and I'm trying to prioritise games I've won on here.

Anyways, I don't know which game made the biggest impression on me, but there's a scene in the SNES game Terranigma that never fully left me ever since I first played it as a kid. (However, the details are a bit fuzzy by now... Gotta play that again sometime.) I'm going to put it in Spoiler tags, although it doesn't have any story relevance.

At some point in the game, you're exploring a snowy mountain, when you get caught in an avalanche, after which you are stuck in a cave along with two mountain goats, who are married to each other. (For context, your player character can talk to animals.) The male goat gets injured during the avalanche and quickly dies in the cave.
The cave isn't large enough to explore or do anything in it; all you can do is walk around and interact with the goats. Doing so with the male goat just tells you that it isn't breathing... Talking to the female goat standing next to it reveals that she started eating the other goat. Your character is shocked at this, calling her out for heartlessly eating her own husband, to which the goat tells you something along the lines of, "Why shouldn't I? If I didn't, I would simply die, as well. You need to be stronger if you want to survive in this world."
Shortly after that, you manage to get out of the cave, and as far as I remember, neither the cave nor the goats appear again in the game.

I'm not sure what I thought about it as a kid; I wasn't shocked or traumatised, but over the years, the memory of that moment popped back into my head every now and then. (I have many great memories of this game, though I never managed to finish it. There is, in fact, another big moment that made a huge impression on me as a kid, but this is enough wall of text already.)

Hi! I'm coming in here to tell you about Milkmaid of the Millkyway. It's nothing big or overly impressive, but in the way it has been crafted. Love and care oozes out of every single pixel it has been created with. It is forged in rhymes, and it tells a beautiful and adventurous story. It has been the first videogame that ever managed to make me cry.