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Does anyone have examples of games that felt, as it were, "literary"?

Yes, there have been plenty of attempts at... aesthete kinda games since the early 80s or so with varying degrees of success, enjoyability, maturity, and... artsy-fartsiness, for lack of a better term. Here’s a small selection skimmed mostly from things I have heard secondhand (I have not played most of these). I’ll admit that even with a tolerance for games that do artsy stuff, I’m kind of biased towards the ones with a more pedestrian appeal, so a large number of these will be like “yeah, but that’s popular”. I also stayed away from newer stuff in compiling this, because people still talk plenty about newer stuff, and what’s more, there is a recent trend of people making lots of... like, un-games: poetry in an empty engine, all symbol, no substance. I can respect that, but I refuse to like it!

I consulted the bibliography of Replay: The History of Video Games to compile some of this selection.

- Ultima IV, an early RPG exploring the concept of virtue (after earlier entries got lumped into the existing moral panic around RPGs).
- Planescape: Torment, a 1999 RPG commonly lauded as “deep” and “philosophical” by people older than me. Apparently you should have some demons of your own before this game will do much for you.
- Mass Effect, an RPG trilogy bringing a universe of its own to life in a way you can explore rather freely (but myself having later looked at some of its clear inspirations, I think some of the critical praise has to be tempered because a lot of it seems to be from sci-fi illiterati).
- Phantasy Star I–IV, which is not big on the High Art side of things compared to most other things in this list, and so much about them makes them kind of painful to play now, but these games have things about them that are a bit different from most other JRPGs and they’re definitely worth experiencing. Rieko Kodama is probably underappreciated as a game designer.
- Final Fantasy is a ridiculously popular series that needs no introduction and some of the games are more mature about things than others. If you ignore the silly / angst stuff, there are some real gems of introspection in what is otherwise about as classy as liking 80s/90s action flicks. I’m being coy on specifics, aren’t I? Well, these days after a number of incidents, I’m reluctant to provide fodder for people to mindlessly find it out of context or whatever and start a “NOOOOO THAT ONE SUCKED” war.
- And while I’m already listing things that are tootin’ mainstream (if not quite RPGs?), Majora’s Mask and Link’s Awakening in The Legend of Zelda series appeal to me in ways that other entries in the series do not. There is something about how tightly constructed they are and the fundamental struggles in their scenarios.
- The Mother series is (allegedly) outstanding in its unconventional everything. Despite the Peanuts-esque artwork and quirky outlook, they are surprisingly touching stories.
- A number of Chunsoft games that never made it overseas are known for well made stories and would probably do well among critical circles if they did manage to get translated. I’m trying to do something about it, but it’s never worked out. The ones that have been coming out lately have been localized for English and if I’m not mistaken, they’ve found something of a niche.
- Infocom text adventures A Mind Forever Voyaging and Trinity were a bit politically minded and some people say they reached literary excellence (viewpoint-wise they are anti-Reagan and anti-nuclear respectively).
- Infocom text adventures in general are worth looking into.
- I hear tell that the early games in France started out more artistic. I don’t know much about them and I wouldn’t know where to find more. A lot of them aren’t in English at all to this day.
- I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream was a video game version of Harlan Ellison’s story made with his direct involvement. His stuff is kind of weird and cruel, but it wouldn’t really be him otherwise.
- The Last Express is where Jordan Mechner spent his money from Prince of Persia. While it’s a bit frustrating as a game, it’s a very neat tale and really shouldn’t have failed as hard and expensively as it did.
- Deus Ex is, to this day, still celebrated for allowing the player to choose what approach to use to accomplish missions. As much as the designers could manage, it is opposed to having a story/setting that doesn’t respond to the way you handle things.
- Siren (aka Forbidden Siren) is a game I will never play because it’s psychological horror stuff, but I’ve read through the Let’s Play and it is has things in it, both story-wise and gameplay-wise, that I have to keep bringing up in discussions with other game design students. If you are prone to existential crises about the nature of the afterlife, this game may just give you one.
- S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl is a very stark presentation of a post-apocalyptic place and your chances of survival in one, to put it one way.
- Balance of Power is an old strategy game about the Cold War, made during the Cold War. Chris Crawford wanted to treat the subject seriously; in case of thermonuclear warfare, the game will end and you will be criticized.
- I like to describe L.A. Noire as a really good movie inextricably fused with some really bad gameplay. It’s got the noir thing down pretty well during story segments, and during game segments... Cole Phelps is a policeman who singlehandedly killed 99% of the gangsters in Los Angeles and stole every kind of vehicle on the road in the late 1940s (and a few that weren’t), driving all of them poorly.
- I don’t know if there is a copy of it that can be found anymore, but as a kid I played a game called “The Stars of the Harlem Renaissance” which as I recall was a typical ehhhhh edutainment thing, but something I thought was cool about it as a Games Are Art™ thing was that in the game Langston Hughes would help you fill in some blanks to write a poem. Maybe I should see if my copy doesn’t have bit rot; that’s something probably worth preserving.

Since art is in the eye of the beholder, I’m sure some of these mentionings will strike people familiar with these works as completely off the mark, but I’m willing to take that risk. Some of these, the game parts may detract a bit from the artistic elements for individual players (e.g. Mass Effect would probably be pretty bad if you don’t like shooting stuff that much). And there are other aspects of art that would make a completely different list (like when people get navel-gazey about the horrifying “endgame” of SimCity 3000, or get hooked on emergent elements of roguelikes and such); I’m kind of trying to go off the prompted examples themselves.