A non human character I completely felt drawn into was the Alien of the original "Alien vs Predator" by Sega.
Few design decisions like a wide angle view, great speed of movement, the ability to climb on everything and a small infrared halo when seeing humans were very effective.

The identification with this creature "unclouded by conscience, remorse or delusions of morality" was so strong that for a while I found myself spontaneously spotting the dark corners and the paths to reach them in every room I entered in the real life.

And again the goals I was asked to achieve brought the story forward, but broke the magic, remembering me that I was in a video game and not just "there".

Hello Jeroen, and thank you.

Despite being a so constrained game I felt a sense of freedom playing The Graveyard, as if I finally wasn't expected to do anything.
I have the "full version" now, but I didn't  play it yet. Maybe I'm not ready to let the nice old lady go 

Michaël, it seems many of us owe you a drink for the inspiration 

Hello everybody,
I'm really glad to join this forum which I've been silently reading since the first days.

I've always loved videogames, very much. But i finished very few of them as I get easily tired of repetitive tasks (like kill, kill, kill... or quest, quest, quest... ) and I feel frustrated when I'm confronted with content put there merely to make the game of an industry-acceptable length.

Since the 90's I asserted in conversations that videogames could be real works of art, but wasn't able to provide any convincing example. I would have been more credible stating that I believed in aliens...

Then I almost casually stomped into The Path.

The joy I felt starting playing it must have been similar to that of Jodie Foster when she first heard the alien message in Contact!

I work as a professional programmer.
And recently I've started dedicating myself to making games.
I almost finished coding my first little project, in the meanwhile sketching the design for the second one, a bit more ambitious and personal.

The goal is to iterate, possibly increasing complexity, aesthetics and meaning