10 Small Video Games That Left HUGE Impacts

Not all video games are created equally.

On one side, there are the AAA blockbusters with budgets as big as the development teams that work on them. These games - your Call Of Dutys and Grand Theft Autos of the world - are intended to thrill and excite with wall-to-wall set pieces and production values able to match Hollywood's grandest spectacles.

And on the other end of the spectrum, there are tiny projects helmed by much smaller teams - sometimes comprised of only one or two people.

These games aren't as long, they lack the polished productions of their bigger-budget counterparts, and they often fall under the radar of mainstream audiences.

What many of these gems are, however, is utterly spectacular. They may be small in scale, but what they lack in size they more than make up for in creativity and artistic flare.

More importantly, they can contain some of the most intimate and moving storytelling experiences to have ever been told in games. By the time players reach the end credits of these titles, they're going to require plenty of tissues while the emotional impact of what they've just experienced sinks in.

In Always Sometimes Monsters (not to be confused with the sequel, Sometimes Always Monsters) players take on the role of a character who's hit rock bottom.

They're months behind on the deadline for the book they've been working on, hundreds of dollars late on their rent, and - to top it all off - the love of their life has just left them and is getting married in a month.

From this point on, what happens is entirely up to the player. They can take jobs to put food on the table, find a means of making it to the wedding, or form meaningful connections with the people around them. Whatever players choose, though, they'll be confronted with morally tough questions with consequences that are often unclear until it's too late to fix things.

The gameplay is as basic as you can get. The only controls are for movement and interaction, and the developers have made working the agency jobs as tedious as they are in real life, and that's the point.

Life isn't always easy or exciting, and this RPG forces players to face this bleak reality and asks what they'd do in a similar situation.