Weird Games General - These game devs definitely do drugs.

[CornBogFitz]

Ive always loved trippy games because of how different they are. Im just so sick of everything being secret future army man FPS. What are some weird games you have found and what are they about? I plan on posting some reviews of my favorites

The dream machine was in development for like over a decade I think. Its a point and click adventure made entirely out of claymation. The plot is someone created a dream machine to connect peoples dream worlds together, but it comes alive and is forcing people to stay asleep so that it can live. You have to stop it. I have never cared for point and click until this game. these types of games usually have a lot of design pitfalls such as weird item combinations, pixel perfect clicking, timed animation etc...This game avoids all of that. some puzzles have multiple ways of progressing and anything involving a key code is randomly generated every play through.

The Norwood Suite is everything I look for in a "trippy game" one of my favorites of all time. The plot has many aspects that take on a dream-like logic, but never so much as to be totally nonsensical. A famous jazz musicians house has been turned into a novelty hotel after his death. Every year a party is thrown in his honor, you must prepare to attend the party. In the process of doing this you discover something sinister. How exactly did Norwood die? This games surrealist architecture coupled with its strange music creates a rare aesthetic. It makes you feel strangely nostalgic for a place you know has never existed. The creator has made multiple games in the same universe. The gameplay is very bare bones, however with every game the creator makes you can tell he is pushing himself.

 

[We Are The Witches]

Speaking of claymation, one game I still have not played, but want to:
Hylics (and sequels)

Yume Nikki
Surreal RPG where events happen, and you're mostly exploring the world. It's a classic and it has music I personally enjoy that set the atmosphere of the game/section of the game.

LSD: Dream Emulator
PS game where you also explore the world.

Seaman
Dreamcast and PS2 game where you take care of a lovely creature that talks to you (and you also talk to him via microphone input).

 

[CornBogFitz]

Broken Reality is a commentary about virtual consumerism and social media wrapped in a vapor wave aesthetic. There isnt much of a plot because youre not really playing as a hero, youre playing as a user of this strange new internet. Your goal is to get as many likes as you can. Its a bit of a collectathon platformer walking simulator kind of thing. it has bunch of tongue and cheek references to dumb things on the internet. A VR sequel is scheduled to release next summer. The scenery is very fun to look at and the music will keep you playing longer than you think.

 

[Syntaxion]

Cruelty Squad "An immersive power fantasy simulator with tactical stealth elements set in a sewage infused garbage world"

 

[CornBogFitz]

Aentity is by FAR the MOST trippy game I have ever played. The title isn't even a real word. There are game mechanics but damned if I can tell you what they are. There is game progression but fuck if I know how I did it. There are exactly ZERO tutorials for this game. All I can tell you is that you can walk around. If you play it you can tell there is some sort of method to this madness but I am not personally autistic enough to understand it. I believe the main point of this is to get some cool screenshots. A lot of these things I would hang on the wall as decorative art. I wish the author made some sort of system where you could buy prints of stuff you screenshot.

Manifold garden is a puzzle game that uses repeating geometry. Very beautiful. makes you wonder how it was even made.

 

[Pissmaster]

Mister Mosquito is a game I've always wanted to try, but never got around to. You play as a mosquito flying around a family's house, trying to drink their blood and not get swatted.

The Japanese cover is cursed:

Spoiler: japanese cover

 

[Caesare]

Lily's Well on Steam

It is a rainy night in the Spring of 2005. Lily is left home alone after her Papa put her to bed. She is awoken by a cry for help outside her window. It is coming from the well. Help Lily gather rope to go down the well and save the poor soul trapped down there.

store.steampowered.com

Lily's Well, a free rpg maker game (I think) on Steam. A little girl goes to investigate someone crying for help in her backyard, and ends of dying in many horrific ways. It's one of those games with several endings, with each death being an ending which reveals more and more of the story. Idk if you'd consider it trippy, but it's kind of creepy in a fucked up way since it involves a little kid dying in pretty horrific ways. It's also very short. You can finish it completely, getting the true ending in around 2-3 hours. After all the horror, it actually has a sorta happy ending, which I appreciated after all the depressing deaths.

 

[Colon capital V]

Demonophobia is a Guro Horror Survival game that features some "truly interesting" drawings and visuals for the environment and its monsters. You play as a Schoolgirl after fucking up a satanic ritual to get revenge on someone, and now you have to find a way to escape Hell itself while dying... a lot.

Game's apparently hard as shit from what I've heard, and you'll probably find yourself frustrated at getting killed a whole bunch.

There was also a planned sequel titled "Xenophobia" but its unfinished and its developer pretty much vanished completely from the internet.

Nevermind apparently the developer came back and made a 3D spiritual successor of the two???

Memento - I haven't played this one yet, but I really want to one day since after seeing a monster compilation of the enemies in this game, the designs really hooked me and I want to see how this game progresses with its story.

 

[Calandrino]

Boong-Ga Boong-Ga (Korean: 붕가 붕가, Japanese: 開ウン！ケダモノ占い[1]), also known as Spank 'em, is an arcade game developed by a South Korean company, Taff System. It is the first arcade game to simulate kancho—a popular prank in Japan where the victim is poked with two fingers in the anus whilst distracted.

Might seem strange if you were brought up in a culture where asshole-probing is taboo.

 

[Mr.Miyagi]

While a lot less obscure than the aforementioned games, I'm compelled to bring up Killer7, which is my favorite work from Suda51, just on the off-chance someone here hasn't heard of it.

The best way I've heard it described is "dream-like", in that a lot of the events that happen and what characters do and say is just slightly off, in a strange way. It makes sense and follows logic, but only on its own internal set of logic. Going into the plot, I could describe what happens, but it loses a lot of the impact of sitting there and seeing what bizarre event happens next, just because the game's method of presentation is so unique.

The cel-shaded visual style means that it still holds up graphically today, and I really recommend checking the game out, either through emulation and upscaling or the remaster. A lot of the chapters also feature unique visual styles for their animated cutscenes, giving them all a pretty memorable and distinct feeling as you go through the game.

The gameplay itself is an interesting mix of "on-rails" third person movement and first-person shooter, focusing on attacking enemy weakpoints as they try to get close enough to suicide bomb you. It's a bit divisive, but I enjoy it, and it's not too difficult overall. Other than playing it for yourself, I also recommend SuperGreatFriend's let's play of it, where he delves into a lot of the supplementary material for the game, such as Hand in Killer7, and even things like the comic book.

 

[Sugriva]

Hypnospace Outlaw rules. You play as a janny who does it for free in an alternate history version of the 90s where sleep internet was invented. Your job is to go around and explore all of these bizarre webpages looking for posts that violate the community guidelines.

It's pretty clear the dev looks back very fondly on the geocities/angelfire days of the internet, and it's recreated pretty faithfully here, complete with rad rotating 3d skeletion gifs. You can get lost for hours reading pages created by schizo conspiracy theorists, indian scammers, teenages, and boomers. The amount of worldbuilding conveyed through these fictional character's shitty personal websites is just insane. They'll even update their pages in response to you deleting all of their shit, it's awesome. There's a lot of really fun puzzles too that parody stuff like napster, limewire, the pokemon craze, and even bonzi buddy. Definitely one of the most interesting games I've played in a long time.

Oh, and the music will live rent free in your head.

 

[Illuminati Order Official]

Just today I grabbed Dujanah - based purely on weird aesthetics so I can't really share any thoughts yet.

Garage: Bad Dream Adventure not only is a really weird game taking place in a strange, demented world but it has some interesting history behind it: it was released in the 90s and only 3000 copies were made so for many years it was thought to be lost media. It resurfaced recently and was re-released on Steam and mobile.

Deadly Premonition is probably well-known. Technically it's just a RE4 clone with open world elements but the world and the characters ooze with Twin Peaks inspired weirdness. PC port is an absolute mess and it's barely playable.

 

[Tactical Neural Implant]

This one I feel will be mostly if not completely unheard of on here: Fluid, AKA Sub (in France) AKA Depth: Sweepstation Vol. 1 in Japan. It never received a US release, and it's exclusive to the PlayStation. Developed by Opus, which is, from what I can tell, one of those ghostware developers similar to TOSE, who mainly assist with development. Apparently they worked on SaGa SCARLET Grace, which is pretty recent.

It's a music creation game, but also a weird third-person "adventure" game in which a pretty nice polygonal dolphin swims through pre rendered CG videos of abstract environments, not all of which are marine. There are 12 different environments, and each have a distinct musical style. While swimming in these "Groove Stages", the face buttons will perform an ad lib instrumentation while the dpad will control the pitch and tone (as well as moving your dolphin avatar on screen).

You can return from these stages at any time by pressing Start; after which you've acquired all the sounds which match the theme of that level. You can then use these sounds, which are broken up into synths, drums, bass, etc. into 8 separate channels, and create your own songs, which will then play on that Groove Stage. You can have two sets per area which you can swap by pressing Select , and you can save two of these to the memory card per area (allowing for up to 4 per stage, but only two can be swapped at a time). This is done through the "Groove Editor" which allows you to alter the volume, reverb and balance among other things of each sound, and there's also a basic visualiser.

The editor is quite basic; there's no way to set definite start and end points for songs, and they'll just loop infinitely, nor is there a way to set up timings for specific instruments and samples to play. You can however use every sample you obtain on any stage, so you can use sounds from stage 12 on stage 2 once you've unlocked them, providing a huge amount of combinations.

Once returning to the stage with your newly edited tracks, eventually you'll have the option to move to the next stage when prompted by pressing R1, or revisit previous stages with L1. The stages are accessed via a polygonal hub area and each stage is represented by differently shaped floating glyphs.

I first discovered this game via a PS1 demo disc which I still have today. As a child I forgot about it, and asked my brother about a dolphin game you could play on the PS1; he insisted it was Ecco the Dolphin, but that wouldn't release on a PlayStation console until the PS2. Years later I dug up the demo and proved him wrong, and ended up buying a complete copy on eBay for $30 AUD. It's still available, quite cheaply, but also runs perfectly on Duckstation and an ISO is readily available. It does run on ePSXe but the tutorial menu won't appear.

There's no differences between the Japanese and European versions, but the European version has some small QoL improvements.

I would recommend this to people who enjoy music creation games, 90s techno/house/dnb/trance, abstract imagery, the mid 90s dolphin/primitive CG aesthetic, and a unique experience that will stick with you. I'm even thinking of recording my PC's audio and making an album; in Japan there were even Fluid "parties" and competitions in which some clubs allowed amateur DJs to use their Fluid tracks!

 

[CornBogFitz]

alien afterlife is a game where you die in a hospital and must face trials to get to the afterlife. the color spectrum alters time progression other than that its a platformer/puzzle game. surprisingly challenging.

 

[Okkadian]

0°N 0°W

No real point to it AFAIK, but very interesting visuals.

The dev has a few other projects (can hardly call them games) on his itch.io page. They are less ambitious but some are in a similar vein.

colorfiction - itch.io