Recommend Us That Weird Game You Love!

Games Video Games
1

With all the recent talk of games like King Of Dragon Pass, and the games in our top 10 lists that don’t really fit, I thought it’d be interesting for us to recommend each other all the eclectic, unique, or just otherwise weird games that we love.

To start off I’ll recommend my weird game, Dungeon Of The Endless.

It was made by Amplitude, the folks who made Endless Space and Endless Legend and is set in the same universe. It’s about a prison ship that crashes on an unknown alien planet and ends up falling into some kind of dungeon. The goal is to help the survivors of the crash escape the dungeon by ascending it’s many levels. It’s a weird mix of a bunch of different genres. The best I can sum it all up is that it’s a rouge-lite, tower defense, resource management, dungeon crawl, RPG. You control the survivors as they move room to room fight their way up the dungeon, but you can also build different machines and turrets in some of the rooms you find to help you out. It might sound clunky on paper, but all these elements come together wonderfully. You unlock different survivors and mods to the dungeon as you go for future runs. You can play it co-op as well which I highly recommend. It’s a BLAST with friends.

It’s this weird little thing made by a dev people associate with 4X games, and honestly I would say its the best game they’ve ever made.

So! That’s my weird game recommendation, and I’d love to hear yours!

9 Likes
2

Hell yes! Dungeon of the Endless is such a good damn game! I think it’s best as a two player game, but more or less people is fine as well.

I want to recommend The Swindle. It is a run-based game where you have 100(?) days to pull off the ultimate heist and in order to pull it off, you need to get enough money and have more gadgets and abilities. How are you going to do that?

Each day you attempt to take money from various randomly generated buildings. The big moneymakers are safes that you hack, but there’s also money randomly about.

Each run feels incredibly tense in terms of risk vs reward. You need to be making a decent amount of money to keep up with the game’s power curve, so you’ll always want to grab more, but sometimes it’s better to leave than risk dying and not get anything at all! This constant choice is the secret to the games success!

Mark Brown describes all of this better than me though:

As a heist game, it is brilliant. As a run based game, it’s brilliant. Really just brilliant! Play it!

5 Likes
3

oh m y god please dont make me install this game for the third time! I wish to christ above that the controls were less squishy. everything else about this game rocks but virtually every time I died it was because the controls did something I didnt mean for them to do

1 Like
4

If I may plug my avatar for a moment, Mischief Makers is a weird ass game starring a robot whose main power is to glom onto things and shake them up (with a delightful audio cue of “Shake Shake!” whenever you shake). It was a very quirky 2D puzzle-platformer in an era where those types of games were definitely not popular. It’s also got a funky art style that holds up to this day.

4 Likes
5

Mischief Makers feels almost like a video game cryptid to me. I’ve seen it occasionally here and there, never more than a little bit of game-play at a time. Yet I’ve never met anyone who has played it, and I’ve never seen a physical copy.

1 Like
6

Beetle Adventure Racing was an action-racer for the N64, developed by the Need For Speed team. It featured some of the most densely-packed tracks in the genre, with shortcuts upon shortcuts, all richly decorated with theme park-style shit like dinosaurs reaching out to eat you, waterfalls, that kind of cool stuff.

With the developer’s NFS pedigree, it controlled extremely well, and had some fun Diddy Kong Racing touches like boost power-ups, and ‘point’ crates scattered all over the tracks in places that required you to think of the track as an environment to explore, rather than just a race track. The point crates unlocked Arena Battle modes, which were a fun multiplayer distraction, but the tracks were really where it was at. Unfortunately, there were only 6 tracks, but they all kick fuckin ass. Metro Madness and Inferno Isle were my favorites!

Below are two videos: one of a regular race on Metro Madness, the other of someone collecting all of the point crates in a single run. If you watch a minute or two of the regular run, and skip over to the crate collection run, you’ll notice immediately that the crate run may as well be a completely different track. They pass through hidden shortcuts buried in buildings and under the roads that the ‘normal’ run doesn’t even hint at.

2 Likes
7

I liked Mario is Missing when I played it as a kid, and looking back that game is fairly weird. After watching Patrick’s stream of Rage I remembered how odd that game was.

1 Like
8

It exists! When I was a kid my dad took me with him to visit my uncle for a few days, and while we were there we rented an N64 with Mischief Makers. From what I remember it was like Gunstar Heroes without a gun. You could only grab and throw enemies or their projectiles to fight back. And shake them to get them to drop items. Shake shake!

Mine has to be Skitchin’. It’s a racing game for the Genesis made by EA that appeared to be running on the same engine as the Road Rash games. But this was no motorcycle racing game. This was a bizarre highway race on roller blades where in order to go fast, you had to grab onto the bumpers of cars and slingshot yourself forward. It’s possibly the most '90s video game in existence.

A quick google search seemed to show that there are some sites out there where you can play it in browser.

2 Likes
9

So many weird little games that I have a fondness for from my childhood, and a lot of them I’ve never run into someone who played them other than my older brother.

I nominated the theme from Robowarrior for the NES in the theme competition, and the game itself is punishing and a lot of fun. It’s hard to explain it exactly, but it’s a side scrolling game where you have bombs and a limited time frame to clear each level. Each level only ends after you find the key, and the key is always hidden. For some levels, the key is hidden on the last screen and you have find it, in others the level is basically a repeating pattern forever until you find the key. You also have an inventory of lamps for dark levels, life preservers for water levels, and other such things. It was a birthday gift for my brother, and I’m pretty sure my aunt just bought it because the cover looked cool. Never met anyone else who played it.

There’s also Rescue: The Embassy Mission, another game I love for it’s theme music, although the theme is probably the only good thing about it. It’s divided into three separate stages, a sneaking stage, a sniping stage, and an infiltration stage. First you need to position your SWAT members (including Mike, Steve, Kemco, and of course Jumbo) around the embassy by avoiding spotlights and gunfire. Then you use them to snipe out the windows. Finally you rappel into the windows and clear out the rest. It had lots of different game modes for a NES game, although none of them were all that great in retrospect.

Super Baseball Simulator 1000 was probably the only baseball game I ever really liked, and only because it was stupid and gave you weird super powers. Outfielders could jump higher than the stadium, the pitcher could throw a ball of lead or turn the ball into a leaf right as the batter swung. Games were rarely played to win as much as annoy the other player as much as possible.

Vette! was a game that came packed in with an old Macintosh my aunt and uncle had when we were growing up. Whenever we would visit, it was one of the few games other than Muncher they had, so we played it endlessly. For the time, it actually had a decent recreation of San Francisco including the Golden Gate Bridge and Lombard Street. Really, we got the most fun out of running down the stick figure pedestrians because they all made a really low guttural “ugh” noise, including a nun, which at 5 was just hilarious.

10

Ooh man, when I think of weird games, there’s one that comes to mind immediately - Chameleon Twist!

The first wave of 3D games were like the Wild West in terms of mechanics and aesthetic, and Chameleon Twist is a great example of that strangeness. A bunch of weird world themes slammed together around doing sick tongue tricks and a story about a group of chameleon friends going on an Alice-in-Wonderland-type adventure? Now we’re cookin with gas!

This thread is doing a great job of reminding me just how many strange gems there were on the N64.

3 Likes
11

If you can stand some anime goofyness and wonky PS2 era controls, I can not recommend Custom Robo for the GameCube enough. It might be my favorite “weird” game ever.

4 Likes
12

Custom Robo is my SHIT

I loved both the Gamecube game and the DS game.

I’ll never get over that one part in the gamecube game, the fucking never ending exposition dump set in a moving elevator, resulting in a like, 40 minute elevator ride

2 Likes
13

The shit I remember is that part where you could just flat out refuse to go on the mission to save the world at the end of the game. All your friends are shit-talking you and pleading for your help, and you can just say “Nah, I’m good”. The game just ends right after that and you have to restart a super long exposition section.

14

I love puzzle games even though I never talk about them, and I was just at my parents house the other day, playing my old XBOX 360, which means I fell into the familiar hole of playing Hexic HD for about three hours. I don’t even know how it happened. It’s just the perfect puzzle game, I think, easy to begin, new concepts come to the player at a slow drip (but a really satisfying slow drip) and though it’s a really chill experience, when it gets intense it can get surprisingly intense, using the slow pace of play to its advantage to make every move feel excruciatingly important.

Of course, my original version I played was the Zune HD version, which I’m almost 100% certain cannot be found anymore.

2 Likes
15

Race the Sun is an endless runner that has you pilot a solar-powered ship through worlds that are generated daily, and that I love for how it plays on the inherent futility of its genre by leaning really heavily into a kind of absurd dark comedy. The writing might come off as a little insincere or edgy sometimes but it’s limited to short blurbs that are usually pretty funny, and the worlds have a sort of minimalist appeal that I’m really into, to the point where I have probably 35 hours in it across three different versions (Steam, mobile, and PSVR).

2 Likes
16

I touched on it in the “what are your top 10 games” thread but Steambot Chronicles for sure.


Look, I know it was laggy and load times were shit, but

  1. It just did SO MUCH
  2. And in such a charming way
1 Like
17

Wait, I know the actual weirdest game I played when I was a kid. It was Lego Island. Check out this segment from Giant Bomb.

3 Likes
18

This old Lego PC games were so good! I think I owe Lego racers my love for the medium in general and i certainly owe Lego chess for being my gateway to strategy games (and boardgames cause y’know, chess).

3 Likes
19

Diary of a Spaceport Janitor - I liked this game so much it inspired me to write badly about it. A thing I wrote just after I finished it:

On the surface, it’s a game about wandering around a giant spaceport and burning trash. At first, everything is overwhelming and nothing makes sense. The game offers just enough instruction to start you off on the wrong foot, then sets you loose in the middle of a landscape which has no regard for you. There are too many different items and charms and vendors, no indication as to what’s important and what isn’t, and the streets seem to loop back on themselves. At some point, you’ll probably find yourself shambling woozily through an alien bazaar as your vision distorts and your ability to read blinks in and out, searching desperately for a genderswap booth. You will vomit on your feet, having eaten rotten street meat, and then collect your own vomit so you can burn it for credits. You will swallow an eye and light a candle to a cruel god. This is secretly the best part of the game, and you will miss it once it’s gone.

Road Not Taken - This is a puzzle/roguelike-like-like from Spry Fox, who you might know for making excellent mobile games like Triple Town and Alphabear. It uses the same art style as those games as well. You play as a ranger who’s sent into the woods every winter to rescue lost children. The movement is grid based, with enemies moving every time you do, and you can pick up and move various objects which interact in different ways. It’s hard to explain why it’s so good, but it’s in part because the tone is much sadder than you’d probably expect (you’ll rarely rescue all the children), it can be excruciatingly difficult, and the puzzle mechanics are all very solid. It’s really unlike anything else I’ve ever played and I was a little baffled that no one else seemed to like it very much.

2 Likes
20

Heart of Darkness was a huge-budget cinematic platformer, the first game with a soundtrack by a live orchestra, and some of the best pixel art ever, but almost no one remembers it. But if they do, it’s for the ridiculous death animations.

There’s nothing too weird about its gameplay, just that it bombed so hard; think of games like Another World and Flashback, but Heart Of Darkness is a step closer to LIMBO and INSIDE and away from those early tries.

2 Likes