I just finished Grandia, an RPG from 1997, for the first time and it's a great game, even if the HD version has a lot of problems and is not the way to play it. It also has a pretty light tone for an RPG of that time, since game companies were focused on making it clear that games could be "edgy" and "adult" so a lot of games dealt (mostly badly) with issues like trauma. Grandia isn't like that. It's like a kid's adventure, where any adversity can be overcome if you just try your hardest, and where most of the human villains end up seeing the light by the end of the game.
That doesn't mean that there aren't characters with traumatic back stories in Grandia, though, and about halfway through the game you meet a character named Rapp, who comes from a village where many of the residents, including his parents, were petrified by some force from an evil tower that got built nearby. The survivors relocated to a new village nearby, but you go with Rapp to destroy the tower and you pass through his old village on the way. There you see a bunch of petrified villagers, who mostly look like normal sprites but grayed out into stone. Rapp's parents are different, though. They look like little eggs.
Rapp explains that he comes to see his parents often and he brings them gifts and polishes them in order to show his devotion, so over time he's worn them down from being like statutes of people to these weird little egg shapes (which doesn't make sense because why would their legs fuse together like that from polishing, and he polished their arms off? but whatever). This shows how much he misses them, which is sad but not remarkable.
What is remarkable is that at some point you figure out a way to de-petrify everyone. There's a big cut scene with swelling music that shows petrified people coming back to life and their loved ones embracing them and being overjoyed. But you never see what happens to Rapp or his parents, presumably because he was such a devoted son that he polished his parents to death. All the other petrified people come back but Rapp's parents are just formless flesh blobs that presumably slump to the ground in a pile of gooey meat. And he's responsible. Because he loved them so much he tried to care for them even after he thought they were gone forever.
This is the kind of stuff that true psychological horror is made of, and it's just a little detail in this game for young teenagers that goes unremarked upon, but I don't think I'll ever forget it. It's really really disturbing.
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