What is the strangest game you've ever played? Please explain.

[TheMadDoctorsCat]

There was this old retro game about an Italian plumber fighting an army of turtles and mushrooms, while eating other mushrooms himself to grow twice as big as he was. All while head-butting blocks for coins, and going down pipes while giant man-eating plants came out of them.

Can't remember what it was called now, it was pretty obscure. I believe the company that made it didn't do very well out of it. Maybe someone is old enough to remember this long-forgotten title?

 

[teqrevisited]

On premise alone I'd probably have to go with Jamestown: Legend of The Lost Colony.

Set in the 17th century, you fight to save a British colony on Mars from the combined might of the Spanish and the native Martians. It has such a great soundtrack and aesthetic, too.

 

[Adam Locking]

Killer7 is delightfully strange and nonsensical, to the point where, after three or four playthroughs, I'm still not 100% sure what's happening in the story. Someone launches nuclear missiles at Japan... which is a good thing in this universe, I guess, since everyone seems pretty happy about it? Your main enemy is a terrorist group, presumably formed by humans, but you only ever fight these weird alien-looking things, and for some reason put their blood into a TV to level up. At one point you have to find your target by getting a complete collection of collectible figurines of his, and those are perhaps the sanest bits of the game.

From one killer7 fan to another, here's a few of the easier-to-explain bits. The enemies "heaven smiles" are humans that have been "turned" by the touch of the main villain, Kun Lan (or in the case of the weaker ones, born from those egg generators). As for Harman and Kun Lan, it seems to be a Freaky Friday type thing where god and the devil have switched places. This is why Harman is the "god killer" and Kun turns people into "Heaven Smiles" with his "God Hand", they are his idea of angels.

It's heavily implied by little snippets of info throughout the game that all the player personas have died twice prior to the start of the game, and were resurrected by Harman in his past life when he had the God Hand. This is why enemy blood heals and improves skills of the other characters, they were created the same way!

There are loads of theories on the net that are worth looking at, they expand the replay value so many times over!

 

[Mikejames]

Well, in Psychonauts you can destroy a city of talking talking Lungfish and help rig a mental board game against the genetic memory of Napoleon Bonaparte before summoning the old psychic in your head with a strip of bacon.

Noby Noby Boy was... odd.

You're a worm in some weird static slab of land in a void somewhere and you eat stuff, and then... uh...

Ah fuck it, I can't explain this shit, here's the video;

It's like Beautiful Katamari meets Tremors...

 

[floppylobster]

Little King's Story -

"After building up Alpoko, Corobo is issued a challenge by a foreign kingdom, which he defeats and conquers, gaining more money, territory, and a princess to keep and be with. Howser then encourages Corobo to unify the other six kingdoms under his reign. These kingdoms are ruled by kings which are: the evil Onii King (the one who issued the challenge in the first place and the leader of a group of demons called Oniis), the drunken King Duvroc (who uses his skill with liquor as a form of fighting), the obese King Shiskebaboo (who uses his obesity to fight back), the riddling Omelet King (a weakling that has his men do all the work while he cowers on his toilet), The TV-obsessed TV Dinnah, the tall Long Sauvage (who is, in reality, a pygmy), and the giant eraser man King Jumbo Champloon (the first man created by "God"). While doing this, the little king also meets Skinny Ray, a man who claims that the universe is coming to an end as evidenced by earthquakes of growing magnitude, though nobody listens to him. Eventually, Corobo unifies the whole world and gains an additional six princesses; however, as the quakes escalate to Armageddon scale, it is decided that the king must build a flying machine (which he does) and discover the cause of Armageddon. Right before, he discovers that his kingdom has gone bankrupt and that all of his princesses demand to come."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAlM-Y1qnx0

It's very Pikmin-like. But has some weird and cool stuff like bosses who question life and death and ponder the nature of knowledge in the middle of the game.

 

[EyeReaper]

so, I'm a big fan of Katawa shoujo, and just recently I discovered a fan game about it titled "Katawa Crash." Which features, among other things:
A character from Tecmo Bowl turning you into a football and running you into a touchdown
Your character being eaten by a giant flying head until said head explodes
Orihime erasing the background
and a girl with no arms sitting in a trashcan who gives you extra lives.

Oh, wait, no. The weirdest game ever is Hatoful Boyfriend, the post apocalyptic Pigeon Dating Sim. I'm sorry, but I don't think anything anyone posts can top cross-dressing pigeons and a sociopath mad scientist partridge who can wield a cleaver. Both of whom you can date, btw.

 

[penguindude42]

Seriously? Twenty-eight posts in, and no mention of Space Funeral?

Space Funeral is a game full of blood, deranged scenery, blood, pseudo-humor, and blood.
Did I mention the blood? Because there's a lot of it. Also, pothead Dracula.

 

[JCAll]

You know, normally I would say Killer 7, that game is designed to make as little sense as possible. That's the entire appeal.

But I spent today playing this:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/270310/
And I'm still kinda speechless.

 

[Liquidprid3]

I know I mention this a lot, but Earthbound, scratch that, the Mother series in general, is pretty strange. I'd say the series is worth it for the Moonside (Earthbound) and Tanetane Island Mushroom sequence (Mother 3) alone. Not to mention the weird, quirky, and sometimes our of place dialog, characters, references, and weirdness in general and you've got an unusual RPG series for sure.

Another strange game is Super Hexagon. Not only because of how trippy it is, but how strangely addictive it is. Seriously, it's my most played game on Steam. (I don't PC game too often, and it's usually short games) Best $0.66 ever spent.

 

[Shoggoth2588]

Packy and Marlon seems to be a rather innocuous mascot platformer on the Super Nintendo. You can play as either Packy or Marlon and take on a number of levels taking place in a summer camp. The thing is...Packy and Marlon is actually an educational game meant to teach kids about diabetes. Each level begins with your character checking their blood sugar, taking a shot of insulin and then they're given a list of food they need to eat. If you eat too much of the food you find in the levels, you fail that level due to having high blood sugar. If you don't eat enough food then you fail that level from having low blood sugar. As you progress through the game you meet up with friendly animal friends who ask basic diabetes-based trivia meant more to help kids talk to their peers about how diabetes effects their diet. It's not a terrible and not all that weird compared to some of the games you guys listed but it was still really, really weird...Of course I had to buy it from my local retailer >.>;

 

[AwesomeHatMan]

The weirdest game ever is Hatoful Boyfriend, the post apocalyptic Pigeon Dating Sim. I'm sorry, but I don't think anything anyone posts can top cross-dressing pigeons and a sociopath mad scientist partridge who can wield a cleaver. Both of whom you can date, btw.

This game. Some of my mates played it as a joke. The weirdest part is even though all the other characters are birds you're a human girl. So it's about a girl trying to make birds fall in love with her or she gets executed or something. The worst part is that if you play the game it gets even weirder

 

[shrekfan246]

Well, there's this one game where you play a late teen who's in some sort of student mercenary force and can't remember anything about his childhood, and he frequently has dreams about these three guys from the past while he's going on some crazy adventures to stop a sorceress who's being guarded by an old rival of his, then he gets a big ice spear through the chest and has to go on a wacky trip through time and space itself to stop a different sorceress from destroying time and becoming immortal, and he ends up time traveling back to his younger self and setting the events of the game in motion.

There's another one where you're playing as a guy who was brought forward 1,000 years and discovers his home city was destroyed in the meantime, so he decides to travel along with a lady summoner who's going on a pilgrimage to defeat the ultimate evil that terrorizes the lands every few years, but then it turns out that you weren't actually a time traveler and the ultimate evil, which incidentally is basically a monster whale, is your dad even though you're not actually even real.

And those are just massive oversimplifications of their plots, too!

 

[mrdude2010]

There's this Japanese game called "LSD." It was pretty weird. You'd wander around and explore seemingly randomly generated environments for about 10 minutes. Even the recurring environments would occasionally sprout random eyeballs and other weird stuff like that.

 

[SexyGarfield]

Horse Master: The Game of Horse Mastery [http://noncanon.com/HorseMaster.html]

it's a browser based text game built in twine and it plays like a fever dream. Horse Master takes place in a dystopian future where being a horse master is the highest honor in society, they live a lavish lifestyle and never want for anything. Modern horses are a genetically modified nightmare spurred further and further into a spiral of "enhancement" by societal pressures stemming from the horse master competition. You play the role of a down on his luck son of a once great horse master who spends the last of his money on buying a horse embryo to raise into a horse worthy of earning you the title of horse master.

I know I mention this a lot, but Earthbound, scratch that, the Mother series in general, is pretty strange. I'd say the series is worth it for the Moonside (Earthbound) and Tanetane Island Mushroom sequence (Mother 3) alone. Not to mention the weird, quirky, and sometimes our of place dialog, characters, references, and weirdness in general and you've got an unusual RPG series for sure.

You know that there is a fan made Mother 4 [http://www.mother4game.com/] in production, right?

Spoiler: Edit to add Horse Master screenshot

 

[Not Lord Atkin]

AAAAARGH, THERE ARE SO MANY!

Deadly Premonition. I just can't. I don't. It doesn't make sense. I don't know what's happening. It's the worst game I've played. Oh wait, it's the best. It's hilarious. Now I don't get it. GET IT OUT OF MY BRAIN.

It's that sort of an experience.

Touch my Katamari. It's a green thing with a cylinder for a head. it rolls a ball. shit sticks to the ball. more shit sticks to the shit stuck to the ball. Until all of the sudden you're snowballing an entire town along with its inhabitants. it's wonderful.

Tearaway. Once you get used to the overall aesthetic, the game isn't all that weird, except.... your face is in the sky for some reason. And it's worshiped by a race of cardboard cutout people.

Anything ever made by Tim Schafer. Take your pick: a workaholic grim reaper unraveling a conspiracy in a skeleton world; a psychic kid who jumps around inside people's brains; a working-class matryoshka doll family in which you take control of other people by jumping into them...


As for Amnesia: the weirdness is inherent from the inspiration. Amnesia takes quite a few elements from the works of H.P. Lovecraft and it shows. If you don't think there's anything particularly weird with Lovecraft's work, here are just a couple of monsters from his stories for reference:

- The colour out of space. Essentially a cloud of coulour from outside the known spectrum that kills every living thing by sucking the life out of it. People and animals under its influence go mad, then fall apart into grey pieces of dried out flesh.

- Mi-go. a race of insect-like fungus people that kidnap people's brains and fly them to Pluto in jars.

- Shoggoth. Also known as flying polyps. Large masses of tentacles, eyes and mouths, flying around, devouring civilisations.

- Nyarlathotep. Essentially an african american. Yeah. Lovecraft was probably not the most politically correct author ever. In Lovecraft's defense, Nyarlathotep IS later on revealed to have been a giant shapeshifting tentacle monster all along.

- The Innsmout folk. A race of cultists from a segregated seaside community, each and every one of them turning into fish people.

- Cthulhu. Yeah, this one is obvious and probably way too well-known for his own good. Think about the concept though. A giant god-like entity that lives in an underwater city made out of physically impossible geometrical shapes. Roughly humanoid figure covered in scales, bat wings, octopus for a head. People go insane from looking at him. Just the knowledge of his existence is a death sentence.

There's no way something inspired by all that wouldn't be weird

 

[ProtosOmega]

Akiba's Trip 2 on the PS3. Possibly on the same level Senran Kagura Shinovi Versus on the PS Vita. Both of these have a stripping mechanic, but what's weirder is that Senran Kagura is a fantastic game regardless of having the mechanic.

 

[NuclearKangaroo]

runner 2, the gameplay is extremely simple, but strangely addicting, also the art style is like an acid trip, but in a good way, i like it, super surreal

 

[Epicspoon]

Probably Katamari. I imagine that's going to be the answer you see the most in this thread too.

 

[TheSYLOH]

The Stanley Parable.....
I'm not even sure if it really counts as a game....
I'm not even sure if it actually exists and i just imagined it it...
What the fuck?

 

[NuclearKangaroo]

OH ALSO, NOW THAT SOMEONE ELSE MENTIONED IT

Antichamber, one of the best puzzle ever, also one of the very few games id consider art, you guys, ALL OF YOU, must play it, is like portal, also is nothing like portal, antichamber is a first person puzzle game that takes place in a non-euclidean space, the way you travel in that game is radiacally different from the way we do in reality, you might way in a straight line only to end up where you began, you maybe fall off a cliff only to land at the top of that very same cliff, is excellent, the out of the box design si applied to the puzzles too, in order to solve em you MUST think outside the box

i really dont want to say more because i feel thatd spoil the fun, GO BUY IT!