11
votes
What were the most novel, unique, or unusual games you played this year?
I asked in another thread about the best games you played this year, which is a question that tends to surface highly polished and often highly familiar gaming experiences.
This thread isn't about "best" but about the most interesting -- games that did something different or odd or tried something new. They didn't have to necessarily succeed at that, and they can be very rough around the edges or even outright bad -- what matters is that they went out of their way to offer something very much their own.
(I really need to start doing a better job of keeping track of the games I play, answering questions like this is way harder than it should be)
Probably more in the "unusual" category than anything else, but Teenage Blob was a great time. It's basically a short punk EP album (outside of the context of the game, it's only 15 minutes of music) where each song is paired up with a little game that usually has at least some kind of synchronization with the music.
None of the games are good at all, but you can tell they had a lot of fun making them, and I was grinning most of the time I was playing. Overall, it's so short, niche, and ridiculous that hardly anyone will ever play it, but I'm glad that I did, and glad that people make things like this.
Genuinely one of the best things I ever did for myself was to start logging this. I have a spreadsheet that is just a running list of the books, movies, and games I've read/watched/played. It's dead simple: I simply log the identifying information (e.g. author and title for books, title and platform for games, etc.), the year I read/watched/played the item, and how I felt about it (my categories are "Loved", "Liked", "Indifferent", and "Disliked").
I've kept the logs going for >15 years now, and I love being able to look back through them. It's also gotten to the point where I'll forget a lot of the media I consume, so having a definitive record helps me answer those "Did I ever actually see that movie?" questions I have.
Cultist Simulator is a strange game I spent a few hours trying to figure out how to play. I can't say for sure if it's a great game, since I think I only scratched the surface, but the store page says this:
The reason for the mystery I expect is to add to the theme of the occult, secret nature of being a leader/part of a cult. It says it's a "roguelike narrative card game" and plays like a single-player digital board game. You first start as some random common person, then when you lose, it unlocks new backstories for other characters like a respected doctor or a bored heir(ess) to a rich family. From what I gather, each playthrough you begin with the basics and the game adds more complexity and events over time which then eventually leads to your defeat (such as if you mismanage your resources) or unlocks one of the many paths in the game.
I don't think I was good enough to get very far, but I might try it some more eventually. When I got the game from the March Humble Bundle, I was really just hoping I could summon Cthulhu but there's way more to it than that.
I feel like I had a great year for games played during 2020. Played Outer Wilds, which is very unique and certainly qualifies for this. Got a VR headset through a friend and got to play Half-life: Alyx, which was a surreal gaming experience. And finally Horizon: Zero Dawn debuted on PC and I just finished that last night, and would if very enjoyable!
Maybe it's cheating to mention a AAA game, but Half Life: Alyx was certainly unique and novel game. The surreal, visceral sight of a believable human or human-shaped enemy moving toward you is incredible. A lot of us in a first-world country won't experience that sort of malicious movement in real life. So it's very strange to feel the emotions of "that's a person wishing me harm", at least for the first couple encounters.
Easily CARRION. You play as a giant, horror movie esque flesh beast escaping the lab you were created in and trying to get into the wider world. It has a really smooth movement system where the creature moves itself by pulling itself along with tentacles, but all you have to do is guide it with your mouse. The entire game fells nice and meaty (pun intended).
Ooblets. It's like a weird mix of Animal Crossing, Stardew Valley, Pokemon, and dance-offs. But it certainly has its own unique style and game's humor is really cute/goofy.
I sadly have not had the pleasure of exploring indie games this year, but one that will go down as likely one of my favourite games of all time would be Observer. I highly suggest anyone who enjoys dark futuristic Noir and Lovecraftian psychedelic horror to be encouraged to play that marvelous game (there is an upgraded version coming early next year as well). The game even features Rutger Hauer in one of his final roles before his passing.
Looks like a pretty good list from John Walker at Kotaku yesterday that probably fits in here: The Best Games Of 2020 That You’ve Never Heard Of. I haven't played any of them personally, but I have heard of at least a few of them!
Not sure it really counts but Microsoft Flight Sim 2020. Obviously not a weird or unique game but it was my first flight sim ever and even with just an XBOX controller I had a great time. Put in about 200 hours in the first two weeks and still am enjoying it now 6ish months later.
Lenna's Inception would be the most innovative I played this year. I raved about it earlier, but it's basically The Legend of Zelda in terms of gameplay, and the innovation comes in with the differences: the items, story, and mechanics, both hidden and not, are refreshing additions and tweaks to what was already a stellar execution of a known formula. If the dev were to make a straight Zelda-style roguelike with his engine I'd play the hell out of it.
It may also be the Hardcore Henry of it's genre: It can only happen once to be any good.
Little Red Lie
Will O’Neill, the game’s creator, entered the gaming scene with Actual Sunlight — a dark and deeply resonant narrative adventure game about depression. It dealt with real-world issues and experiences in an unflinching and powerful way.
Little Red Lie is a worthy and standout follow-up. It’s not an immediate sequel and is its own standalone story, but the tone, commentary, and format that O’Neill touched on in his debut are mastered here.
It’s the kind of game that bucks the very name of the medium, as “game” implies at minimum a sense of play, and that is deliberately absent here. There is no levity, joy, or “play” to be found. It is instead serious and heavy all the way through.
Backspace Bouken
Take the sort of first-person grid-based dungeon-crawl of Ultima Underworld or Legend of Grimrock and make it a typing game, and you’ve got Backspace Bouken. It’s not a full RPG, but I enjoyed frantically clacking on my keyboard through its myriad, maze-like levels.
The game uses spaces as a resource — you only have a finite amount of them. To get more, you steal them from signposts around the level, but you can also strategically type to conserve spaces by using contractions. Thus, if your enemy's typing prompt says “You should have stayed away!” The game will accept “You should’ve stayed away” as a valid input, which saves you a space and less characters to type, meaning you’ll hit the enemy faster.
A bonus for this game: there’s a good chance you might already own it and not know it. It was included in itch.io’s massive racial justice bundle. I liked it so much I bought it on Steam to support the devs (who also put out a native Linux build as well!).
INFERNIUM
I’ll qualify this with the following caveats: I didn’t play the game as intended, and I didn’t finish it.
The game as intended is a sort of Dark Souls meets Amnesia hybrid. You wander through an odd, dark, beautiful environment and gather light, which is an irreplacable resource (there is only a finite amount in the world). You use up light to access new areas and use powers, but you also lose it on death (though you can go back to where you died to recover it).
Throughout the game there are enemies that you cannot directly attack, so you have to strategically avoid or hide from them. I didn't play it as intended because the developer includes an option to just flat out turn off the enemies. I utilized that and instead played it as a sort of walking simulator through an interesting, beautiful, and surreal environment, which I enjoyed.
Spoilers
I don't know if this was a glitch or the developer screwing with me, but I put >10 hours into the game enemy-free, only to have the ever-living daylights scared out of me by a hostile being who decided to show up in my game anyway and surprise me in the darkest of corridors. I stopped playing there, and haven't returned to it. Nevertheless, I enjoyed my time with the game, and for anyone who enjoys Amnesia-style run-and-hide horror gameplay, I think this would be absolutely splendid.
Killing Time at Lightspeed
This is a short narrative adventure game where your character is traveling at relativistic speeds while refreshing your social media feed filled with your friends back on Earth. Each refresh of your feed, which takes only a minute or two of your time, represents a leap of months or years back on earth. It's a short, inspired piece of futurology with a staying power that far exceeds its short runtime.
Break Stuff With Coins
A lot of the other stuff I included in this list was more serious or heavy. This game is the complete opposite. It's pure, dead-simple, mindless fun. You throw coins to break stuff, and part of the fun of the game is attempting to cascade destruction, but part of the fun is exploring the game's secrets and interactivity. In the first level you can knock a box of popcorn onto a pot on the stove, then turn on the stove to pop the popcorn. It's got a lot of little touches like that which are fun to find.
The game itself is... not very polished, and I almost stopped playing it at the beginning on account of glitches and other frictions. I'm glad I stuck with it though. The game feels like a hidden gem from back in the N64 or Dreamcast era, complete with all of the wonkiness and lack of modern quality of life that implies.
It's almost the same idea as Dangerous Golf, which is flashier and has much higher production values. Ultimately though I had much less fun with with Golf. Break Stuff With Coins simply scratched the guided destruction itch much, MUCH better than its bigger budget brother.