updated the list which now has over 100 games! such an interesting collection.
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this looks fascinating. here is page with some info and links on how to play
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Yes ! It’s cool yeah. There are a number of super interesting and mostly forgotten games in that general style meaning CD-ROM and for the time high tech visuals adventure games that are designed more as multimedia software. Lighthouse: The Dark Being, Drowned God, Lunacy come to mind
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A good chunk of my gaming time lately has been dedicated to this type of games. I guess I could use the general what are you playing thread but I find it more interesting to share my discoveries here, as it both feels more relevant and helps with exposure to like-minded individuals who are also into the weird gamingsphere.
First of all, I played both Cape Hideous and Fragrance Point, two previously mentioned games, and had great experiences with both. Cape Hideous is short, sweet and incredibly evocative for such a short experience, but I wholeheartedly recommend it. It’s the closest I’ve felt to reading a Lord Dunsany story in videogame format. Frangrance Point on the other hand was an interesting one. The weirdness of its looks is in contrast with the familiarity in terms of design. Despite the odd abilities, mobility and characters, it’s more or less a traditional adventure with some non-linear metroidvania elements. Regardless of this familiarity, it’s a cool game with a very unique tone, setting and vibes.
A couple of discoveries of my own are:
Similar to Fragrance Point, this one looks weird but plays in a familiar way. It actually reminds me a lot of El Shadai. It’s a traditional action adventure with a couple of elements borrowed from ICO. You are a war machine anthropomorphic giant who has to battle and do light platforming and puzzles while protecting the tiny creature that awakened you, called Chibito.
Repose repurposes (aliteration!) the core of a first person dungeon crawler to create more of a linear exploration adventure in which you have limited steps (oxygen) to explore some weird oneiric technofantasy ruins as a nameless worker for an obscure megacorporation of dubious interests. I played this close to watching the second season of Severance and there was some cool feedback between both, as this also has some of those weird fictioney Vandermeer or Mieville like elements, along with some Twin Peaks and even Silent Hill vibes. Also, it’s Short & Sweet, it gets my recommmendation.
Went through some of a Megastructure-related media binge past month. I read Blame for the first time, revisited Susana Clarke’s Piranesi and also played a couple of games with similar themes like this one. I hesitate to put the game in this thread because in all honesty it’s not that weird despite the odd looks mostly related to the low-budget nature of the game. Thing is, the game is incredibly cool, the narrative is interesting and well executed, the environments are awesome, the pacing is great and the only really weak aspect is the combat, which isn’t great but it’s not terrible either.
Another chapter of the Megastructure binge I mentioned. This one takes the vibes and aesthetic of NaissanceE and makes it into a non-linear exploration adventure. It’s very light on the gameplay department but the pitch here is very simple: do you feel like taking a walk over some of the most cool-looking awe-inspiring environments in a game ever? Then play this. It’s more of a walking sim, but there are some collectibles, narrative bits and hidden areas that add some spice. Think of a first person metroidvania game in which the only verbs are walking, looking and occasionally activating buttons or talking to characters. Not for everyone perhaps but I had a great time with it.
And that’s all! I have a couple of interesting looking ones on my backlog (Psychopomp GOLD, today is my birthday, Daemonologie, Closer to Home, etc.) but I’d rather talk about them after playing them and having anything to say.
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There’s an aesthetic in these sorts of games I also love, but I can’t help but wonder if this label is a bit reductive. It seems like most of the games being posted are included for psychedelic or mixed-media visual styles, and/or ambiguous narratives. Doesn’t labelling a game based on this refuse to engage with its substance by solely placing it in opposition to more dominant aesthetics? To an extent I would argue that many arcade-style games (ex Devil Dice, Super Monkey Ball, Pop’n Music) are completely abstract but have thus far been ignored because we are overly familiar with their conventions. This is a bit of a cliché point but what exactly “happens” in Pac-man and Tetris also remains borderline unintelligible despite their status as apparently immortal classics.
To be a bit more precise, personally what interests me about a lot of these “esoteric” experimental games is when they lack coherent signification. In effect they’re inherently post-structural games, where the mapping from the audiovisual information presented by them to strict mechanics the player can interact with is unclear or absent. In more deliberate cases the chain of signification is obfuscated by some larger, uncommunicated system taking the signifier of a mechanic and making it signify a completely different mechanic or interaction when it is revisited. Some examples of games that do this kind of thing which immediately come to mind for me:
-Problem Attic
This was already posted in the thread months ago but was what initially spurred me to start thinking about games in this way. From level to level the exact goals, mechanics, even the means of control are pulled out from under the player, making it entirely unclear how the player interfaces with the game or how its visual elements relate to one another. Especially after the “first lap” the game sort of becomes glitch art, which is fundamentally a breakdown of a program’s structure (here is an interesting perspective on the notorious bugginess of Pokemon’s first generation).
-Rule of Rose
For the most part a conventional(-ish) survival horror title, but its back half pulls a very interesting stunt where assets and landmarks from the airship you explore for most of the game are reused within certain buildings you gain access to. This changes how you understand these landmarks and how you find your way between them, as your sense of direction and the game’s geography is confounded by finding them in new contexts, playing into the game’s themes of remembrance. See also the Sandy Petersen levels of Doom, I guess.
-Illvelo
A shmup made by the same team as Radirgy, but with a stage list almost reminiscent of Atlantis no Nazo. Picking up certain items in the “main” game will send you seemingly at random to a bonus stage, where taking out every enemy grants you a key. Apparently getting at least 50 keys unlocks a true last boss, which also requires the player to find secret bonus stages whose entrances need to be damaged before they can be used like a Dodonpachi golden bee. There is a straightforward game buried in here, but the game is obviously messing with you when you teleport from stage 1 into stage 94 like 3 seconds into the game.
-Bit Generations: Coloris
This is a match-3 puzzle game I have played for several hours without being able to understand the mechanics. Basically, you’re presented with a spectrum of colors, and you have a cursor you move onto a tile and press the a button to change its color. If you make a row or column of at least 3 tiles of the same color, they disappear and the tiles above it fall down. Typical stuff. The weird part is, you have no control over what the color is changed to. The tiles go one step closer towards the end of the spectrum that your cursor is colored, but that color inexplicably changes sometimes when you change any tile. I think when it changes may be random, but I’m not sure. There is also a lose condition where I think depending on how long it’s been (in turns and in real-time) since your last tile matched (and also maybe how large it was?), some of the board will turn into garbage puyos which need to be cleared before you continue making progress in the level. I do not know how either of these mechanics function and it makes it so that there isn’t really any planning ahead so much as you can kind of mindlessly make matches when you see them and it will generally help.
Also, completely unrelated but Cornelius did the sound design for Coloris and I think it sounds soooo good. I wish he would compose for a larger-scale game! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvrlcoLBW0o
-Soul Symphony
Some kind of physics platformer with visuals so busy that half the time I was playing I could barely even see the level design I was apparently traversing. Hatsune Miku is singing something in Chinese in the background and there’s some Feng Shui iconography I recognize but I completed two laps of the campaign and still have no real idea what I am expected to do or what I was looking at most of the time.
Come to think of it, both Rule of Rose and Coloris were developed by former Love-de-Lic staff, they might be the go-to developers for this sort of game. I recall playing a bit of L.O.L.: Lack of Love and failing to understand what I was supposed to do, although that might be a skill issue on my part. Anyways I hope this doesn’t come across as too antagonistic to the thread, at the end of the day I am just one more person with an opinion and want to hear what other people think about this.
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To be fair to the thread, any game that we are overly familiar with wouldn’t fit the “strange” part of the title.
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Adjectives like strange and disorienting are fairly subjective and they can vary depending on what one is more familiar with, sure. It is restrictive, but I would argue that is a good thing, just like the thread “music nobody knows about”, it is a way of highlighting stuff you wouldn’t necessarily discover otherwise. If it were about any game with unintuitive logic or a high level of complexity, it would be a much less useful descriptor imho.
I would argue with a lot of these games, their wilfully eccentric style IS the substance, or a large part of it. They celebrate and double down on a particular aesthetic experience that can be roughly described with those adjectives. It is a way of categorising games based on the effect they produce on the player, rather than a more mechanical description. To me, that is way more flexible and open-ended than saying, like, “puzzle games”.
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I would argue with a lot of these games, their wilfully eccentric style IS the substance, or a large part of it. They celebrate and double down on a particular aesthetic experience that can be roughly described with those adjectives.
Good point. I guess I was coming at this from a zero-context perspective, when obviously these games are in conversation with the rest of the medium. What I take issue with is defining these games as “strange” because it sort of dismisses the substance of the game by not asking what motivates its unconventional decisions. In the previous post I highlighted a particular strain of these that I find compelling, but I think there’s a broader point in there that most games look a certain way because their visuals take into account certain assumptions about gameplay and user experience. These aspects of experiencing a game don’t exist in a vacuum, and defining the game by “it looks different” feels almost arbitrary to me, like saying “games with vending machines in them” is a genre.
I also agree that it helps to highlight games we wouldn’t be talking about otherwise, like I said I really enjoy some of the games already posted in this thread and will be checking out some of the others in the near future, my point is just that I think the label stigmatizes them and stymies discussion of their actual substance. I just wonder if there’s a more to-the-point label.
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I have been summoned by the invocation of tetris
I’m about to be annoyingly pedantic. think this is like, categorically not true? I think tetris specifically is exceptionally intelligible to human beings. Even outside of the broad cultural context that it lives in, watching the average game of tetris for ~5 minutes lays out all that one needs to know about it in order to understand everything about what tetris is. pieces that are manipulated by the player fall from the top of the play field into a stack at the bottom, a solid horizontal line disappears from the play field and shrinks the stack, pieces fall faster as time goes on and the player continues to clear lines, the game ends when the stack reaches the top of the screen or an arbitrary amount of lines are cleared. There are finer details with regard to how pieces behave and can be manipulated and those details can be identified almost instantly by anyone who has either seen or played any version of tetris before. materially speaking, that’s the whole thing. everything essential to tetris is communicated by the playing of tetris. it seems so easy to grasp for human beings that it seems almost primal, its language is simpler than language
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First of all, I think of something being strange or different as extremely high praise, and I think most people on this forum would agree. This is mainly a recommendation and discovery thread, the very premise of it is a celebration. I think you are interpreting the prompt in a very narrow way, but in fact it is a completely open-ended categorisation. It is not with mockery or derision that I look at these games, it is with awe. As someone who has been playing games for a long time, I immensely value “this game is trying something different/looks different/is communicating something abstractly/produces an unusual effect”. As a result, I am substantially more interested in checking out the games here than in the general what are we playing thread, for example. So, for me personally, it’s a perfectly valid and useful label.
“Experimental” might be more to-the-point, as the OP says, but that would probably remove games that are interesting by accident in one way or another; it implies a sort of arty intentionality which is an unnecessary limitation to the category (and would also invite a bunch of extremely conventional games with one quirky twist!).
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Heck yeah, this is the thread for the sickos.
We all love this shit and the fact we made and participate on this thread regularly is a testament to that. One important thing also on top of the open ended nature of the topic Tombo mentioned is that the descriptor came first, then everyone started contributing.
It’s not that we had this reductive idea of what a weird game is and then decided to flag every instance of it here. @slugpaste presented the thread and everyone contributed to the topic with what came to mind. The definition of strange, abstract and disorienting is completely open ended and on-going and everyone is welcome to pitch their take on that, you @pep included of course!
In fact I take your appreciation to heart and will try to look for less “stereotypical” strange games. Although I’m a sucker for the particular brand of horror-adjacent weird we ended up landing on here (and it’s kinda what I’m looking for when I check this thread lol).
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@Funbil remember when those quirked up zoomers made NeoTreasureCore
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i’m just gonna vibe here at the ether for a bit if y’all don’t mind
tbh i think there’s value in the video game equivalent of acieeed as opposed to pure Gameness or pure abstraction or whatever even if it is ultimately self-defeating. like, colouring outside the lines is necessarily going to invoke the lines in some way and there’s value in that. we have come to 202X with this idea that games exist in the same space as narrative and communicative media. they need to be stories or iterate on stories or otherwise present themselves as literature or cinema or opera in order to qualify as legitimate art or whatever. I think this thread exists to appreciate games that push those boundaries or have a fraught relationship with them, because playing with boundaries is kind of an inherently interesting thing to do and we might as well play if there’s space to play in
something like tetris, though… or puyo, or rogue, snake, lolo, pacman, space invaders, dodonpachi and gradius, bemani games, robotron, animal crossing, harvest moon, tokimeki memorial, chess or go, smash and street fighter, doom as an engine, and so forth
you might think these are conservative or old-fashioned or straight up weird examples, but in my mind these are works of art not because they engage you by provoking emotion so much as they do so by provoking cognition. they provoke performance, and in doing so they can bring you closer to an experience of yourself as a person and as an animal in a way that is totally unique from what narrative media can accomplish. narrative art connects you to others, but interactive art connects you to yourself. that shit is so in and out of vogue at the same time these days. the very worst of the worst dopamine looping skinner boxes learned their fundamental lessons from these most sublime examples of interactive art and as such are trying to offer you infinite unsolvable mathematics puzzles supported by buttons that feel good to press all wrapped up in vaguely countercultural aesthetics that narratively gesture towards an individual revolution that you can achieve by getting good enough… with the advent of itch.io and mass digital distribution and jams and shit even making a game feels like a game in itself now…
at the end of all this it feels like anything that directly interrogates the conventions that led us to the doom eternal destiny two diablo four guideline tetris survival horror remake nightmare is a convincing argument against those conventions even if all it does to interrogate those conventions is to prominently feature dentata or terrence mckenna vibes or whatever. which is ultimately why this thread exists i guess. because it’s kind of cool
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Mouthole is now free on Steam but it’s going to be removed (and thereafter available only on itch). If anyone cares about having it in their Steam library, now is the time to add it. It’s one of the best things to be mentioned in this thread, in my opinion.
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