Image via Complex Original
The culture of weird video games may be nothing new, but how often do you come across a game that seems ripped straight from a Fear and Loathing trip? Here’s 10 games that’ll make you swear you (or their creators) weren’t sober for.
10. Noby Noby Boy
Platform: PS3 (PSN)
What is Noby Noby Boy? I don’t know. It’s a social experiment, in that the more you stretch your avatar, a thing called BOY, the more points you get, which can be submitted through to PSN to give to GIRL, another thing (with a bow) attempting to stretch across the length of the universe, her progress fed foot-by-foot by players’ length contributions. The non-game followup from Katamari creator Keita Takahashi, Noby Noby Boy defies explanation. BOY can move around a small randomly generated map, eating things, jumping and extending his middle like a striped worm, but there’s no point other than extending GIRL’s progress and seeing exactly what you can accomplish with BOYs limited moveset (can you tie him in a knot?). You may find trippier games, but they aren’t common.
9. Flower Sun and Rain
Platform: Nintendo DS
FSR may be the strangest game Suda 51 has made. The protagonist is a “searcher”—sort of a private eye for the lost-and-found—that helps clients recover missing objects. When you arrive at the tropical resort Flower, Sun and Rain, it (confusingly) seems you’ve got an easy task of bomb defusing ahead of you at the nearby airport, but the hotel guests have other plans. While you’re busy helping an angel get drunk or a wrestler discover the key to his philosophy (things they’ve lost), time ticks on, and at the end of each day, the plane you were supposed to save from a bomb threat explodes before the day repeats, Groundhog Day-style. It gets weirder: you carry a briefcase named “Catherine,” sort of a catch-all device that inexplicably solves any problem—with math. FSR’s dreamlike gameplay makes it the most Lynchian game on this list, with long dialogue exchanges that make little sense and a questionable perception of what’s real. It’s also one you have to play with a pencil and notepad. Feel high yet?
8. LSD
Platform: PS One
Name jokes aside, LSD is based on a dream journal one of the game’s programmers, and boy, is it out there. It barely qualifies as a game, really—you walk through randomly generated environments looking at whatever the game decides to throw at you, whether it’s a giant demon walking across a landscape or a samurai with a puffed up head. Run into something and you’ll be transported into another dream, which will likely be weirder. Because of its procedurally-generated content (as well as the decidedly low-poly ps one graphics) LSD has earn cult status—you’ll never see the same dream twice, at least not with the same textures—and the more you play the weirder it gets (try playing it in the dark.) Psychedelic is putting it mildly.
7. Ninja Baseball Bat Man
Platform: Arcade
This one is sort of self-explanatory. It’s a brawler starring a bunch of ninja baseball robots fighting a cadre of anthropomorphized ballgame paraphernalia, aircraft and slot machines, not to mention full-lipped shadows and dogs in trenchcoats, in U.S. cities like Seattle and San Francisco. If that’s not suggestive of drug use, I don’t know what is.
6. Killer 7
Platform: Gamecube, PS2
It’s arguably impossible to leave Suda 51 out of a list of trippiest games, and his U.S. debut, Killer 7, made a strong case for defining abstraction in his twisted visions. Playing as a group of seven assassins with varied skillsets, what little sense can be made of the dense socio-political storyline involves killing a suicide bombing terrorist group populated by “smiles,” a group of unearthly, maniacally laughing creatures. Gameplay is lucidly out of whack in its own way—aside from the you’re confined to running down straight lines like an on-rails adventure game, stopping to shoot smiles in first-person and often talking with ghosts and a man in bondage that speak in gibberish. A nightmarish acid trip even when sober.
5. Jojo's Bizarre Adventure
Platform: Xbox 360, PS3 (XBLA, PSN)
Characters in this late 90’s fighter battle with stands—essentially supernatural manifestations that do most of the legwork for their masters. Oddly, stands can take the form of anything: ice creatures, vines or revolvers, or incorporeal powers that might make a truck fall from the sky as easily as it might spray random pieces of metallic junk from a girl’s boobs. An HD port of Jojo is out next month for your vampire hunting pleasure (yeah, you read that right), while Asura’s Wrath developers CyberConnect2 are working on a new series title for PS3, so there’s plenty of Jojo tripping to be had in the near future.
4. Muscle March
Platform: Wii (Wiiware)
Another overly bizarre game that was somehow brought stateside, Muscle March’s premise is simple: taking your pick from one of several comically beefcake men (and, uh, some polar bears) you chase down thieves who have stolen your protein powder. The only way to catch said thief is by mimicking their flexing pose as they crash through walls—the further along in the stage, the faster you have to change your position. I don’t want to think about what this game would be like under the influence.
3. Datura
Platform: PS3 (PSN)
Somehow this Sony-funded PSN title exists, despite the fact that it’s basically an interactive experimental film. That said, the bulk of Datura is walking around a surreal forest—I would think this wouldn’t be a good place to take mushrooms, let alone the titular plant the game is inspired by—where you dig through garbage, activate arcane mechanisms and lead a hog into an underground passage, only to emerge on the other side in a car driving down a dark road. The lack of dialogue and ambiguous script Did I mention you interact with the world using what looks like a rubber disembodied hand? Creepy.
2. Child of Eden
Platform: Xbox 360, PS3
File this one under abstract: like Rez before it (well, for its time, anyway), Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s 2011 shooter blends fast-paced rhythm and searing visuals in a vibrant cocktail of seemingly random colors, geometry and form. No two stages look exactly the same and there’s no point in trying to describe what could basically be summed up as an interactive piece of modernist art, but this is exactly the kind of game stoners would want to watch.
1. Seaman
Platform: Dreamcast
What better way to kick off a trippy games list than by highlighting one starring a talking fish with a man’s face? Believe it or not, this odd Tamagotchi-esque aquarium simulator was a high-profile Dreamcast title for Sega back in 2000 (Leonard Nemoy lent his pipes to this underutilized narrator, for one). With the pack-in microphone, you could talk to your Seaman—which is to say its limited AI would ask you questions, mostly—and with regular care over time (you had to feed it similarly-faced caterpillars after your finite supply of food pellets ran out) it would evolve, growing legs and eventually changing its genus completely. But mostly, it was a virtual pet starring an animal with a man’s face. Somehow this spawned a PS2 remake, a Christmas-themed expansion and a sequel, in Japan. Weird, man.