10 Strangest Indie Games

Let’s have a look at some of the strangest games out there. Here’s a bunch of them.

 

Donut County

Have you ever wanted to be a racoon? Have you ever wanted to be a racoon who controls a hole that can swallow entire buildings? Well, if you’ve ever wanted that extremely specific thing then Donut County is the thing for you. Think of it like Katamari Damacy but instead of starting with a small ball that gets progressively bigger, this is all about starting with a small hole that can, at first, can swallow pebbles but can later take down entire skyscrapers.

Donut County is not particularly long, but it’s got an entertaining story about a trash panda who “delivers donuts” by destroying everything in his path and he then needs to face the repercussions for his actions. Fun, silly, and far more involved than you’d initially expect. Check it out to find all the inventive ways they manage to use a hole mechanic! 

 

Dr. Langeskov, The Tiger, and The Terribly Cursed Emerald: A Whirlwind Heist

After the success of The Stanley Parable, the two people who made it went off and did their own things. Davey Wreden later made The Beginner’s Guide, and it’s a fantastic narrative game about parasocial relationships and game development, but William Pugh decided to start a studio that has released a few games so far. The first of which was this thing. It’s a very short walking sim, but it’s completely free and quite interesting.

You are, essentially, put in the role of someone who works behind the scenes to make a video game work for someone else. It’s a piece of meta-game storytelling and while it is definitely not the strangest thing on this list, it is a good thing to start us off before the craziness really gets going. This very lengthily titled game is a good, quick jaunt through some of the things gaming could do if it wasn’t chasing money everywhere.

 

I Can’t Believe It’s Not Gambling GOTY Edition

Do you like opening loot boxes!? Do you hate that loot boxes are part of the predatory monetized nature of modern gaming?! Well, look no further than I Can’t Believe It’s Not Gambling. This game was made as a tongue-in-cheek response to the absolute tidal wave of live service games that decided to use these nefarious little things, but instead of having to pay for one loot box after another, you instead pay one small price for one game and then get to do nothing but open loot boxes!

The game is strangely satisfying. There are cutesy little animations for every loot box you receive, and you get flashy animations as you open one after another to get some utterly pointless collectible items. You then move from one rank of loot box to the next and just open them repeatedly until you get all the collectibles in each category. It’s silly, but you get to open all the loot boxes you want! No longer any need to open Counter-Strike loot boxes!

 

Doki Doki Literature Club

A bit of a classic for its subversive nature. This game is initially extremely boring presentation because it plays like every other anime visual novel dating sim, but once you get through the first few hours of utter drivel, things change. Doki Doki Literature Club is a masterclass in subversion. Most games jump straight into the action, and you’d be forgiven if you got bored during those early hours, but the boring lead up is necessary for the later payoff.

Doki Doki Literature Club is intensely violent and bloody, it deals with very heavy subjects, and it is not for the light-hearted. Beneath the cutesy veneer is a dark story about desire and depression. In addition, it does some very interesting things with the medium of video games but saying anything more than that would be to spoil it. However, the base game is also free. So, you don’t really have anything to lose, and it’s definitely one of the games that cannot exist in any medium other than video games. So, give it a whirl.

 

Dropsy

Should this game be called weird? Or should it be called horrifying? If you want a truly horrifying time, you should look up the photorealistic depictions of Dropsy that Devolver Digital, the publisher, inexplicably decided to produce when marketing this game. However, the game itself is not necessarily horrifying, but it is odd. You play as Dropsy, a clown that terrifies people, because clowns are terrifying, as he tries to help people around the circus.

The game is a point-and-click adventure in which you try to solve peoples’ problems, and whenever you do solve someone’s problems, you get to hug them. There aren’t many games that let you hug a tree to make it smile. Not everyone wants to be hugged right away, but everyone eventually wants a hug when they’re happy, don’t they? The story is told without language and it’s simply a wholesome game about not judging people by their looks. Clowns deserve hugs too.

 

Hatoful Boyfriend

Wanna date a pigeon? Who wouldn’t want to date a pigeon!? So, this game is all about dating a bunch of pigeons who also double as cute anime boys. Why? Do you need a reason beyond the idea of dating a pigeon and having a bunch of deep conversations with them and then them turning out to be an anime boy? If you need more than that then your standards are far too high.

Hatoful Boyfriend is also designed in the style of visual novel dating sims, so this means that it can be replayed multiple times over so that you can date as many of the pigeons as possible. The game isn’t necessarily long and, to be honest, the gimmick does fade away quite quickly as it becomes more of a standard dating sim, but the initial spectacle is one that’s worth experiencing. Even if you only do one playthrough and then never touch the thing again.

 

Everything

A strange yet poignant game. Sort of. It’s a bit pretentious at times, but it’s mostly interesting. And the main very strange thing is the way everything moves. You see, in Everything, you play as everything. You can be rock, a plant, an animal, a mountain, a planet, et cetera. You start out small and can soon move from one lifeform to another, and it’s also rather fascinating because the game wants to show you both how big and how small things can go. You can end up becoming a planet as you slowly orbit the sun and/or you can shrink down to the size of an atom.

The game comes across as an attempt at something educational, and it does broadly do that, but because the game has limited animation, everything rolls when it moves. So, if you’re an elephant, you’ll just roll around the world. It’s jarring. And to add to all that, you occasionally unlock audio clips from Alan Watts, the philosopher who popularized a large number of Eastern philosophies and spiritual ideas for a Western audience. The whole thing is quite strange. Furthermore, the trailer was the only video game trailer to ever qualify for the potential to be nominated for an Oscar. It wasn’t nominated, but fascinating that this random game is the closest gaming has gotten to the Oscars. 

 

I Love You, Colonel Sanders! A Finger Lickin' Good Dating Simulator

Marketing is a strange thing. Back in the day, you could just put an ad in a newspaper. No one reads those things anymore though. So, then they did internet ads, and they do okay, but then they discovered that that they could just be weird on social media or do performative displays of political affiliation. However, no one has committed to being an utter bunch of weirdos more than KFC with the release of their visual novel dating sim in which you try to court a sexy Colonel Sanders.

This game is a free thing, so what have you got to lose? I Love You, Colonel Sanders! puts you in the shoes of someone attending a culinary school with Colonel Sanders, and you need to simultaneously try and woo the eponymous Colonel while also facing off against your anime rival and become the best chef in the place. It’s very silly and it’s a piece of advertising, but it somehow winds up far more entertaining than it has any right to be. Also, as a final aside, KFC also announced its own console a few years ago. Gloriously terrible ideas abound!

 

Shower With Your Dad Simulator 2015: Do You Still Shower With Your Dad?

So, do you? Do you still shower with your dad? A very odd game and a very odd question. Judging by the name, you may immediately think that this game is not suitable for all ages, but it isn’t actually a dirty game at all. You play as a small boy who has a limited amount of time to run to wherever his dad is in the room without running into any of the obstacles the game throws at you. It’s the kind of thing you would at first, assume you’d find in the mobile marketplace. But Shower With Your Dad Simulator is way more elaborate than you could ever expect it to be.

The game is extremely cheap and starts out being one of these endless, beat-your-last-high-score kinds of game, and it doesn’t do anything special. Then you unlock the next mode. Then the next. There are multiple modes that add to the strangeness. When you end up flying in a bathtub while shooting down other dads, you’ll realize that you’ve reached a bit of a strangeness singularity. Sometimes you shouldn’t judge a game by the title.

 

Genital Jousting

Probably the weirdest game on the list. How do you, as a developer, follow up on your wildly successful game BroForce? Well, you just go in the weirdest direction you can go and simply make a game in which you play as a large, colorful, and very floppy penis. This game is not meant to be pornographic. Well, it is, but it’s not meant to be sexually arousing. Instead, you play against friends by trying to get your head into the butts of your adversaries. It’s a very normal thing to want to do. Obviously.

The thing that makes it even weirder is that Genital Jousting isn’t just a silly multiplayer game you can play with friends to have a laugh. No, that would be more normal. Instead, it has a full single-player story that takes about 90 minutes to finish. In it, you play as John, a penis who feels inadequate and has to deal with his feelings of inadequacy, but perhaps the Steam page says it best: “He's wobbly, he's soft. But he wants to be hard. So very hard. He wants to show everyone his astounding rigidity. And with your help, that's exactly what he'll do.” So… yes, that’s certainly a game you can play.
 

What did you think of our list? Are there any weird games we missed or snubbed? Tell us in the comments!
 

Justin van Huyssteen (@LC_Lupus)
Senior Editor, NoobFeed