10 Best Games That Are Unapologetically Weird

I’ve always considered myself a champion of the weird, the unusual, the off-kilter. There’s nothing wrong with stuff with mass appeal, of course, but genuine weirdness is something to be championed and preserved.

I should clarify what I mean by “genuine weirdness.” Any game, show, or movie can do something stupid and random, then point to itself and go “ha ha look how weird and random I am.” That’s dumb and boring.

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True weirdness is unapologetic, unfettered. It’s not weird because of a marketing decision; it’s weird because some very creative, very strange people had a vision, and saw it through to completion.

Will it make sense? Probably not! But not everything good needs to make sense. It just needs to make you think, perhaps make you laugh, and generally see the world in a way you may not have previously. These are the games that I think of when I think of “genuine weirdness.”

I’d Vote For Michael Wilson

FromSoftware is, generally speaking, fairly serious in its development styles. Its most well-known franchise, Dark Souls, is a dark and morose fantasy epic, mildly strange in some of its designs and settings, but not to a noteworthy capacity. However, let nobody say that FromSoftware doesn’t know how to let its imagination run wild when it’s so inclined. Just look at Metal Wolf Chaos.

This originally-Japan-exclusive Xbox game stars a fictional United States President, Michael Wilson, hopping into a giant armored mech to fight off a coup d’etat by his maniacally evil Vice President, who mugs and monologues at him like the Joker.

You travel across the country, blowing up tanks and other mechs, slinging giant weaponry, and getting into exaggerated action movie shootouts one after the other. Also, there’s a giant railgun built onto Alcatraz Island.

Metal Wolf Chaos is completely bonkers, the most American game ever made by Japan. I don’t know if the devs wanted to make a stereotypical action movie or were just throwing darts at a board, but it is a brilliantly mad spectacle either way.

9 Undertale

Makes You Feel Things For Pixel Art

You ever think about how wild it is that Toby Fox is as big of a deal as he is? Not to say he doesn’t deserve it, of course, but the fact that he got to where he is largely through a game full of chunky pixel art is, in a vacuum, pretty weird. Undertale was the kind of game that needed to happen exactly when it did to have its lasting impact, and boy did it ever.

Part of Undertale’s conceptual hook is that, on the surface, it looks like any other half-baked RPG someone could throw together in RPG Maker. But because the game was released when it did to the people it did, players saw beneath that. It caught the right eyes of the right people, and suddenly, all of the game’s deeper themes and technical aspects came into sharper focus.

Undertale is a game that takes painstaking effort to appear as though it’s much simpler than it actually is. I know some people who only ever finished the basic playthrough with a minimum of attention and thought no more of it, genuinely not knowing there was more beneath the surface. It’s quite a trick for a piece of media to pull on you.

8 The Neverhood

Everybody Way Oh

I can only think of a handful of games that were animated with traditional stop-motion animation, or its sibling claymation. It’s not surprising; they’re incredibly time-consuming forms of animation, especially for something that’s supposed to be interactable. One of the few games I can think of that tried this, and did an excellent job with it, was The Neverhood.

This 1996 point-and-click adventure was made entirely in claymation, including its characters and environments. Claymation isn’t inherently weird, but the game’s overall design definitely makes up the difference there.

The characters have bizarre, otherworldly proportions, and certain story and incidental events seem to occur for basically no reason. There’s a whole bit where you can pull a string on a ceiling, and a gross bug monster falls on your head and scurries away. And then you can do it again.

The game’s intense weirdness does make it a bit obtuse at times, though in absolute fairness, it wasn’t a 90s point-and-click game unless it was at least a little obtuse. Consider it an excuse to experience everything the game has to offer.

7 Thank Goodness You’re Here

British Humor Made Manifest

Even if you’re not from the United Kingdom, I think anyone with sufficiently nerdy parents has at least dipped a toe into the realm of British humor, thanks largely to classic shows like Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

British humor, at least in my estimation as a Yank, banks heavily on the intersection between the strange and the mundane. Nowhere do I find that clearer in recent memory than when I played Thank Goodness You’re Here.

Thank Goodness You’re Here can best be described as a playable British slapstick cartoon. It’s set in a sleepy, yet undeniably odd Northern England town (based on the real-life town of Barnsley), where the populace constantly pester you for assistance with their chores and tasks. Such chores and tasks include pulling a vagrant out of a runoff, making the world’s largest meat pie, and rounding up seagulls for a half-naked homeless man.

At no point are any of these oddities acknowledged beyond a casual glance and offhanded comment from the populace. It’s like a self-contained bubble of weirdness that you’ve had the momentary pleasure of visiting, and honestly, it makes me consider visiting Northern England for real just to see if it’s similar at all.

6 Pizza Tower

Like My Favorite Childhood Cartoons

I grew up during the golden age of Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon, with shows like Cow & Chicken and Ren & Stimpy getting up to all kinds of weird and gross shenanigans that probably wouldn’t fly today. Making a game inspired by those kinds of shows is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a great way to get the attention of 90s kids, though pairing that with high-speed platformer action is how Pizza Tower got everyone else.

Pizza Tower embodies all of my favorite elements from those long-gone cartoons, from copious slapstick to random, full-throated screaming to bizarre, anthropomorphic food monsters. There is little in the way of consistent theming between the game’s levels, and there doesn’t really need to be. You are a supernaturally-stressed pizza chef, run as fast as you can. There you go, that’s your setup.

All of that weirdness serves as a potent glue that holds together the surprisingly deep layers of technical precision. If you’re just here for the wacky antics, that’s fine, but if you want laser-precise speedrunning, Pizza Tower can accommodate that as well. It’s like the world’s most intricately-assembled robot dancing around in a frayed, greasy mascot costume.

5 Katamari Damacy

The King Of All Cosmos Is Still An Icon

If there were a single game console that could be considered the weirdness ambassador of the sixth generation, it’d be the PlayStation 2. The platform had third-party support falling out of its ears, and anyone could put a game in motion, no matter how weird it was. Arguably, however, the undisputed king of weird for that generation, and possibly of all time, is Katamari Damacy.

Katamari Damacy, and its subsequent sequels, had you controlling a microscopic Prince who would roll a giant ball all over the world. Whatever the ball touches sticks to it, causing it to gradually grow in size until you’re grabbing entire cities. Said cities are full of blocky civilians, random sumo wrestlers, dancing animals, and random giant objects.

I don’t even really remember how Katamari Damacy entered into popular culture. Being a generally fun game with a cool gameplay hook definitely helped, but even so, it seemed particularly out of nowhere. One day, all was calm, then the next, we were all subject to the mad whims of the King of All Cosmos. It was just so bizarre, so unlike anything else released worldwide around that time, that it managed to cement itself in everyone’s minds permanently.

4 Killer7

Let Suda Cook

I’ve played just about every game Goichi Suda, better known as Suda51, has ever worked on, and have started to recognize his hallmarks. Just about all of his games are packed with one or more of his following interests: luchadors, assassins, cool guns, magical girls, and tokusatsu. One of his most prominent works to feature all of these is Killer7.

While Killer7 was not the first game Suda ever worked on, it was the first where he really got to cook, jam-packing it with all of his favorite things in a wild mish-mash of concepts. Putting aside the fact that I like most of those things too, you can tell just how much Suda loves his hobbies by how they’re represented in this game. All of the Smiths are cool, especially luchador Mask de Smith, and your foes, both human and inhuman, have distinct designs and characteristics.

Admittedly, the plot of Killer7 is borderline gibberish at the best of times, but the game has so much style oozing out of it, that you kind of just don’t care. There are multiple moments that make you say, “I don’t know what just happened, but I liked the way it happened.”

3 Death Stranding

Kojima’s Weird And Wonderful World

In the same vein as Suda, Hideo Kojima strikes me as a guy who really knows what he’s about. He loves spy thrillers, he loves science-fiction, he loves high-concept fantasy. There are definitely shades of this throughout his seminal work on the Metal Gear series, but those games are still mostly grounded in a consistent theme. Mostly. When Kojima finally got to make a game for himself in the form of Death Stranding, though, he went whole-hog with it.

Death Stranding is the kind of game that, realistically, I don’t think anyone else but Kojima could’ve gotten away with. It’s 80% walking and climbing from place to place with very little combat or other gameplay gimmicks, not to mention his usual movie-length cutscenes. However, because Kojima and his crew approached this concept with such earnestness, it ended up coming together brilliantly.

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It’s still an exceptionally weird tale, this journey of Norman Reedus and his Funky Fetus, that throws a lot of pseudoscience and proper nouns at you that you’re just kind of expected to get. But we endeavor to get them because Kojima gets them, and really, don’t we all want to be a little more like Kojima?

2 Deadly Premonition

A Glorious Train Wreck Of A Game

I’ve adored bad movies for most of my life. Not just underwhelming movies or parodies, mind you, but movies that are so ineptly put together that they loop back around to being incredible. It’s a lot harder to do this with video games, as games take a lot more specialized technical skill to realize, but it’s not impossible. You know how I know it’s not impossible? Because we live in a world graced by Deadly Premonition.

Deadly Premonition is an anomaly of game design, something that by all accounts should not exist. Its engine and gameplay are held together by duct tape and a child’s wish, the character models are gormless and uncanny, and the plot is incomprehensible at the best of times. Yet, despite all of that, both I and many others over the years have come to love this exceptionally weird game.

It’s a little difficult to pin down Deadly Premonition’s special sauce, but I think it’s primarily in that same genuine vibe I’ve been going on about. One odd director and his crew wanted to make an open world supernatural detective game, and while the result lacks technically, you can tell they really wanted to make something distinct. Against all odds, it worked.

1 Hylics

Like A Living Surreal Painting

I’ve encountered my fair share of media that attempts to defy classification, with obscure or misleading descriptions and trailers. Hylics, however, doesn’t really need to attempt anything. Its very existence is a mystery, the kind of thing you could never possibly understand unless you play it, and even then, it’s iffy.

The game’s Steam store page description is made up of a single sentence: “Hylics is a recreational program with light JRPG elements.” This is true in the most literal sense, but also a major understatement.

The game’s graphics are composed of the most absurd, nonconforming assets I’ve ever seen, like what you’d get if Salvador Dali got his hands on a bunch of Play-Doh molds. Characters babble in barely coherent monologues, and burritos are projectile weapons; none of it makes sense in or out of context.

By nature of being a video game, Hylics gradually becomes clearer the longer you play it, which is a fascinating exercise in mental hoop-jumping in itself. It’s not just weird, it’s the kind of dense, gelatinous weird that you need to put the work in to appreciate.

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