Strange and Obscure Video Games Worth Playing: Beyond LSD Dream Emulator
If You Loved LSD Dream Emulator, These Games Are For You
Some games defy easy description. LSD Dream Emulator, Chulip, and Stretch Panic share something specific: they were made by people who didn’t care whether you immediately understood what you were playing. The weirdness isn’t incidental — it’s load-bearing. Here are six more games built the same way.
Yume Nikki
Released as a free fangame in 2004 by a developer known only as Kikiyama, Yume Nikki puts you in control of a girl named Madotsuki who refuses to leave her apartment. All you can do is go to sleep and wander. The dreamscapes are vast, disjointed, and frequently unsettling — no goal, no story handed to you, no explanation for any of it. You collect “effects” that alter your character, find passages to stranger areas, and mostly just absorb whatever the game throws at you. It’s free to download, it spawned an entire genre of exploratory fangames in its wake, and if LSD Dream Emulator is your benchmark, Yume Nikki is the obvious next stop.
Seaman
This Sega Dreamcast game from 1999 is a virtual pet simulator about raising a fish with a human face. That alone earns its place on this list. Seaman went further by using the Dreamcast’s microphone attachment so you could talk to your creature directly, and it would respond with deadpan, often condescending commentary. The game tracks real time too — neglect it and your Seaman suffers accordingly. It gathered a cult following outside Japan for its dark humor and genuinely strange aesthetic. Physical copies are difficult to find now, but it remains one of the stranger experiments the medium ever produced.
Incredible Crisis
Developed by Polygon Magic and published in Japan in 1999 (and North America in 2000), Incredible Crisis follows four members of a Japanese working-class family all trying to get home for their grandmother’s birthday while their separate days collapse into complete chaos. One gets swept into a massive aerobics class that somehow becomes life-or-death, another survives a bank robbery, another ends up riding a giant boulder through city streets. Each scenario plays out as a frantic, genre-jumping minigame. The tonal anarchy is the whole point. It flew almost entirely under the radar in the West and almost never comes up in recommendations like these, which is genuinely baffling.
Noby Noby Boy
Keita Takahashi — the designer behind Katamari Damacy — made this 2009 PS3 release as a deliberate rejection of what games are conventionally supposed to do. You play as Boy, a worm-like creature who stretches by eating objects at one end and excreting from the other. No winning condition. No real objective. You exist, stretch, and report your total length to a global tally that slowly unlocks new environments for the entire player base. It tips into “is this even a game” territory pretty quickly. That seems to have been exactly the intent.
Ribbit King
A 2004 GameCube and PS2 title built entirely around the fictional sport of “Frolf” — frog golf. You launch a frog from a catapult using a hammer, trying to reach the goal in as few shots as possible and picking up bonus points along the way. The courses are bright and cheerful, the rules are just plausible enough to follow, and the whole game carries a gentle absurdist warmth that’s hard to place. It sold poorly and most people missed it completely. Copies aren’t cheap to track down these days, but it’s precisely the kind of game threads like this exist to surface.
Deadly Premonition
Swery’s 2010 survival horror game was famously handed a 2/10 by IGN on release. It also developed one of the most devoted cult followings the medium has seen. You play as FBI Agent Francis York Morgan, who narrates everything to an invisible companion named Zach, makes constant references to old films, and investigates murders in a small American town. The open world is clunky, the combat rough, and somehow none of that turns out to be the memorable part. The characters and atmosphere are singular enough that many players consider the game unforgettable specifically because of the friction — not despite it. A director’s cut was later released and makes the whole thing somewhat easier to get into.