/og/ - Other Games

this is like lair4anon tier levels of desperate but please hear me out lmao

Have you ever felt truly "lost" in a video game or other piece of media?
There's a really specific feeling, kind of like anticipatory anxiety or excitement combined with being way out of your depth in a part of town you've never explored before, that I get when I play certain games. I had a lot of nightmares as a kid about waking up from a nap and finding that I had missed some incredibly important event or phenomenon, if anyone can relate, and it kind of feels like that. I guess the buzzword would be "derealization", but I don't think that quite covers it.

DELTARUNE and .flow were kind of the two biggest, but I got the same sense really acutely when I played Persona 3 Portable, as well as my first playthrough of Persona 5 Royal. There was also an indie mobile puzzle game with really beautiful art direction called "Monument Valley" that had a similar "vibe", if anyone's familiar.

DELTARUNE kind of makes sense, because in DELTARUNE (and to a lesser extent .flow), there's a whole bunch of tiny plot threads to pick apart and dialog and implications to analyze.

Persona 5 also sorta checks out; the loads of backstories from the social links combined with the surreal environments and conspiracies can make your head spin.
But the others kind of don't add up.

Weirdly enough, I don't really get this sense when playing Hotline Miami, etc, despite that game having a very deliberately confusing and surreal plot and mode of storytelling.

Has anyone had a similar experience? I'm really curious. It makes playing those video games both incredibly draining and infinitely more interesting. Once again, I will accept the schizo-autist accusations like a samurai accepts seppuku, but genuinely I'm really really curious lmao