Portal/Portal 2
So, like I said on the Top 10 page, Portal was the first game I ever played that took my breath away with its narrative. The idea is, you're a human working your way through a series of increasingly complicated physics puzzles. You have a portal gun capable of shooting a blue hole one place and an orange hole somewhere else, so you can jump in one and come out the other. The voice creating the tests and guiding you through them, a snarky AI named GLaDOS, says very uncomforting but hilarious things like "This next test is impossible. You will almost certainly die. Good luck," but she promises you that, when it's all over, there will be cake.
The moment 3/4 through, when you realize you're completely disposable and the cake is a lie, well holy shit. I didn't get it. I sailed hopelessly into the fire, dying twice in a row, until eventually my then-boyfriend Jake couldn't take it anymore and shouted at me to check out the suspiciously, perfectly portal-able wall above my head before the fire consumed me a third time. Beyond the utterly fascinating physics (which, as game mechanics go, rank first for me), the execution of the unreliable narrator trope and the turnaround as a player from lab rat to vengeful heroine (all within a counter-revolutionary sci-fi context), could not be more masterful. I still think it's the best gaming experience I've ever had. After I finished it, I learned the brilliant credits song ("Still Alive," by Jonathan Coulton) on guitar and, when Jake and I eventually broke up, spent a whole lot of the next year mournfully singing it to myself.
So, like everyone, I had very high expectations for Portal 2, and I wound up really liking it. Not like Portal, because that shocking narrative arc is hard to emulate, but they got about as close as you could get. Portal 2 treats the "omg we get to go backstage!" mechanic as a given, not pretending like the first game that there is some privileged onstage to go behind at all. You get shot down into the bowels of the facility, going back to the beginning of the testing program and learning how the technology evolved, racing a clock and working together with GLaDOS to defeat a new AI enemy even more dangerous because of his idiocy. The experience of playing it was a bit of a bummer for me, because you spend so much time tromping through metallic wastelands and squinting for anything high up you can put a portal on. The vibe is less "resistance fighter," more "escape the post-apocalypse with your life if you're lucky," but hey, both of them are combinations of the two, it's just which is more privileged.
re: awareness of female protagonists, Portal and Portal 2 pass the Bechdel test! A bit Samus-like, Chel is more of a neutral figure (we don't see her unless through a portal), but she is definitely female and definitely all about brain instead of body. GLaDOS is female too, although, obviously, a computer. In Portal 2, GLaDOS makes a lot of snide comments about Chel's weight, which is funny but also weird, like a go-to hurtful bitchiness quite out of step with this context; they are in a collapsing postapocalyptic factory without any sign of human life or food (the cake being, after all, a lie), so being fat is quite literally the least of anyone's concerns. But, hey, you know girls, always obsessed about their weight amirite?
