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Great question, there are to my memory 4 games that have had a large emotional impact on me. Mother 3, the gameboy advance follow up to Earthbound, did so several times as I mentioned in an earlier thread. What's most impressive about Mother 3's manipulation though, is that it manages to do so despite telegraphing the shit out of every major plot point. Nothing catches you off guard in the main plot for Mother 3, especially if you have played Earthbound (although there are some good twists inside most of the chapters). It barely disguises the masked man, but his unmasking destroyed me anyway. Same with pulling the final needle (until Nintendo wimped out). It's hard to talk about without spoiling it, and I don't want to do that because more people should play it.
Anyway I blame the music, which is brilliantly composed for emotional resonance. Good music is kind of like a cheat code for emotional impact, it sucks you into the narrative and adds substance to it, subtly maneuvering your brain into emotionally established patterns. Which brings me to two other games that have brought tears to my eyes - Journey and Nier. Journey is a pretty simple game that was designed from the ground up to manipulate people's emotions, which is a bit cheap in my eyes, but it did a good job of it, which made it handy in the "vidya isn't art like films" arguments that were popular at the time.
Nier probably doesn't need the proselytising I used to do for it these days, what with the remaster, but if you like emotional experiences in video games and haven't played it, you really should. All three of the main characters are designed to be off-putting, but each of their tragedies pulls at your heartstrings regardless. But if Nier's characters and story are a one-two punch Keiichi Okabe's gorgeous soundtrack is the follow up uppercut that puts you on the floor. Kaine's story is a great example - her theme is the beautiful Kaine/Salvation a soft and ethereal piece with lyrics that seem to be a melange of Gaelic, Greek, and Japanese. It plays when you first meet her and then again, sometimes slightly altered, when she takes the story lead at other times. So when her story comes to a climax in one of the endings, and the triumphant Kaine/Escape starts playing, it was a a real challenge to maintain my composure.
I am still not happy about the last of the four, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter. The baby scene is too cheap, it's such a jagged tonal shift from the slow drip-fed mystery you were just walking through that it still ticks me off. Which is not to say the sequence itself is badly done - it isn't at all, it just didn't belong tvoec imo.
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