Top Video Games For "Relevance"

I'm curious if anyone has one or more video games that come to mind as dealing with moral or spiritual themes in a way that stood out to you. I'm also curious what those themes were and what, if anything, you felt the game was "saying" or advocating.

Just finished my 3rd play through of the original Shadow Hearts. The whole game has a strong occult backdrop with a variety of religious iconography peppered throughout the experience. Despite all this, I found the game to be very humanistic. Near the end, the heroes were really talking about the resolve and power of humankind, and the party of heroes actually goes up against "god" in the climax. The language alternates from referring to it as "God" and "a God", so it's not clear what the intended concept was. But it gave off a mildly noticeable "anti-theistic" vibe.

The Mass Effect trilogy, especially near the end, also seemed to take a strong naturalistic view of the universe, despite incorporating some "spiritual" characters. It's pretty clear near the end that whenever you choose not to affirm the personhood of your ship's A.I., you are making the "bad" choice. (Of course it doesn't help that the only options are "Agree with a philosophically untrue statement", "Say nothing" and "Disagree and be a big jerk about it".)

The game "Last of Us" is one that comes to mind right away for me. It deals with themes like redemption, needs of the many vs the few, and does it with a great story that lets you usually choose between all out assaults or sneaking around in a much more realistic than say Metal Gear Solid (not bad games in and of themselves)

Paeter wrote:
The Mass Effect trilogy, especially near the end, also seemed to take a strong naturalistic view of the universe, despite incorporating some "spiritual" characters. It's pretty clear near the end that whenever you choose not to affirm the personhood of your ship's A.I., you are making the "bad" choice. (Of course it doesn't help that the only options are "Agree with a philosophically untrue statement", "Say nothing" and "Disagree and be a big jerk about it".)

The end of that trilogy has pretty much ruined the entire trilogy for me. 100+ hours of my life, dozen of choices, two characters, and all forced into 3 possible endings with a different instagram filter. Two years and it still hurts! I'm also well aware of how ridiculous this sounds.

In line with my previous post: "Planescape: Torment"

I give it a quality score of 8.0 and a relevance score of 9.5

Most of the games I play (strategy) don't deal with spiritual themes at all. Some deal with religious themes, but do so in an empty way.
Take Empire: Total War and Shogun II: Total War. In both you can send Missionaries into the field to convert the populace to your religion, and/or build religious buildings to do the same in territory you control. For what purpose? To modify the level of rebellious attitude of the populace. In Shogun II, it is a little more complex, you can convert your family's religion to gain trade rights, and Missionaries can directly cause rebellions. So in those games religion=conflict and politico-economic gain. It also keeps me from playing as the Hindu or Islamic states in Empire because I just can't get over converting a populace away from Christianity.
Overall... I'd give them about a 2/10 on the relevance scale.

Pretty much every Final Fantasy post 10. 10 is obviously the most blatant example, but 13 had some underlying themes about rebelling against the higher power. Lightning Returns (which admittedly I did not actually play) seems to have been about fighting against the God of Light after he deemed humanity to be a failure, and proving humanity's worth. Its one of the reasons I'm hesitant about FF15. On the one hand, the gameplay that's been shown looks fairly impressive, but on the other, if the whole point of the story is how evil God and religion are, than I doubt I'll be able to enjoy it.