Red Faction series is good, although the narratives are a bit shallow since they are FPS games. Red Faction: Guerilla is the best one of the ones I played through. Workers organizing into a rebel faction and fighting cops/military. The background lore is pretty extensive over the series.

I think the original FF7 had a storyline that was quite radical (before it goes completely off the rails). A bit naive and adventurist, sure, but Community Development & Mutual Aid Organiser: The Game™ is a pretty niche genre to be honest.

Minor to moderate spoilers ahead for a game that’s probably older than you are, I guess?

The big evil corporation that’s literally sucking the life out of the planet, the very obviously stratified initial setting that is very Battle Angel: Alita-style (how tf that story got a Hollywood remake is beyond me), the CEOs that don’t give a fuck, the military-industrial complex, the pseudo-CIA, the mining town that was destroyed and turned into a slum which has relocated beside the glitzy overdeveloped Disneyworld-cum-Vegas casino city… what I like the most in the storyline, in a thematic sense, is Wutai and Rocket Town - both are frankly kinda boring in the game itself but you have Wutai which is sorta post-WWII Japan/sorta Century of Humiliation China which has become a tourist town that is trapped between two worlds and it’s just kinda wrecked by the aftershocks of war, then you have Rocket Town where Cid has a crisis of conscience, where he has to confront the fact that he can’t just keep his head down and be apolitical in his own pursuits - he has to confront the fact the big corporation doesn’t care about him, his town, his aspirations, or the people and that he is disposable to the corporation, just as the entire world is, so he cannot opt to be neutral.

There’s the obvious stuff about eco-terrorists and Tifa and Barrett fighting for Marlene’s future as well as the hippie eco-village too, of course.

Idk it’s just interesting to me that the setting of FF7 is mostly a mix of near-future sci-fi dystopia, a huge amount of slums for a game which do not feel at all cookie-cutter or repetitive, and a lot of backwards, bucolic towns that are usually semi-screwed by the after-effects of war or underdevelopment and so they are nice in a sense but they’re also varying degrees of fucked.

The next time we would see anything near this degree of radicalism in a FF narrative would be in FFX which is very anti-religion in its message but given that the setting is basically The Catholic Church At The Peak of Its Power (except an eclectic mix of mostly-East Asian religions and culture as inspiration) then the radicalism in the message is more anti-feudal(ish) than anything more modern.

Hardspace: Shipbreaker is super fun and plays well on the deck

Great class consciousness

Arknights has pretty based writing, but warning it’s a gacha mobile tower defense game.

If you wanna though, you can just go read all the stuff on the wiki, the game is way to hard anyways…

obligatory mention of the metal gear series, especially Peace Walker where you literally help the sandinistas and the KGB fight the CIA despite Snake’s constant monologues about how he isn’t on anyone’s side or something.

Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries has a kind of weirdly restrained straight-faced satire going on, many of the missions have characters pointing out that your actions are war crimes, and several campaigns have explicitly communist-themed factions like the Crimson Inclination as the enemies that point out how you are running dogs for aristocrats, and the primary campaign has you attack an innocent farming space-colony for supplies (with the option to help them instead for less rewards) and destroy dense cities during an invasion (your feudal boss on that one, Prince Davion, insists it is the Least Bad Option while your mechanic protests, while the enemies point out that Davion recently married a child bride to justify the land grab since the territory you are invading is between his and his child bride’s holdings). Whenever you destroy a building on one of the ‘space colony’ themed maps, you can see silhouettes of (unarmed) people fly out of exploding airlocks to their deaths.

Cruelty Squad is kind of like if an Eli Valley cartoon was an FPS game, every NPC dialogue could be a tagline here, and in fact some are. Playing this game has definitely made me less relatable to normal people however, i have accidentally upset 2 people because of how it has shaped my thoughts, with things like referring to my body as a ‘meat hole with a consciousness trapped inside’ (the edges of the screen in cruelty squad resemble flesh in some circumstances, and the game engages with relevant existential themes with lines like ‘divine light severed: you are a flesh automaton animated by neurotransmitters’). One of several endings explicitly quotes and namedrops Georges Bataille.

idk if it counts but the ending of the first ArmA has a twist where it turns out you were lied to about which faction committed an atrocity that started the conflict and implicates the USA as responsible.

Brigador takes place on a planet that is subject to imperialist regime change, where the Great Leader was considered problematic but beneficial (he made water affordable!) and that his deposal is a bad thing. You explicitly work for the badguys.

Obligatory mention of Guevara/Guerrilla War, but also Ikki, a game about a Japanese farmers’ rebellion against their feudal landlord.

I haven’t played it yet but I listened to an interview kino letter did with the creator of Umurangi Generation. It has themes about climate change and the guy who made it knows his theory

Haven’t finished it, so I don’t know how the overall message and characters land, but Another Crab’s Treasure has some class consciousness and some critique on landlordism and capitalism on the first half (I say this because the main character has a very specific goal that I haven’t seen challenged ideologically yet, which is against the greater good).

It is not introspective, you cannot expect the writers to wax on about the system. Commentary is made by the characters along the way, but mostly in a caricaturistic (?) manner, about the failures of capitalism, and the mental gymnastics those who defend it must do.

However, it is fun as hell. Like if Rare from the old days of Conker’s wanted to make a souls like, with an overarching theme of anticrabitalism.

The Last Worker has you play as the last human worker at an Amazon type company. Mostly a narrative game. It’s 1st person 3d with voice acting. Gameplay is walking simulator-like, although you do get to fly a futuristic forklift.

I think you get contacted by some sort of socialist resistance org, and they have you fight the company. There was a physical switch release that my library had (!) but it’s on Steam too.