Summary

  • Unconventional storytelling shines in AAA games like Death Stranding, inspiring A24's live-action adaptation.
  • Indie games aren't the only ones pushing artistic boundaries; large-budget games like The Stanley Parable offer unique experiences.
  • High On Life delivers a hilarious and creative FPS experience led by the minds behind Rick and Morty.

If you're a fan of beautifully shot films with unconventional and truly unforgettable stories that leave a lasting impression, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:such as those from A24✤ and even Neon, y♓ou might want to see the same from games. Luckily, some developers still push artistic boundaries in the interactive medium as well and come up with unbelievably original concepts.

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From the Kingdom Hearts series to Death Stranding, these are some of the most unique, creative and bizarre triple-a games 🐼around.

While you'll mostly see this kind of arthouse, experimental storytelling style from indie games, there are still one or two larger-budget games that try to bring something refreshing that's never been done before.

10 The Stanley Parable ℱ

A Satirical Game That Inspired The Apple TV+ Show Severance

Released
𝐆 October 17, 2013
ESRB
E10+ For Everyone 10+ due to Fantasy Violence, Mild Blood, Mild Language, Tobacco Reference 🌌
Developer(s)
🧔 Galactic Cafe
Publisher(s)
Galactic ♒Cafe 🍃
Platform(s)
PC
How Long To Beat
2 Hours
Metascore
89

If you've seen the unconventional workplace sci-fi drama Severance on Apple TV+, you might start to draw a lot of parallels to the themes in The Stanley Parable. That's because this game served as one of the inspirations for the Ben Stiller-helmed series, among other media.

The Stanley Parable is one of the most oddly fun office mystery stories you can play; if such a genre even exists. Without giving too much of the experience away, you'll be working a desk job as a person named Stanley, and from the first-person POV, you'll end up navigating through the office space to figure out what happened to your missing co-workers, often presented with very satiric✤al choices that poke fun in a meta way.

9 Papers🥀, Please

A Gut-Wrenching, Narrative-Driven Simulation Game

Released
🍸 August 8, 🧸2013
ESRB
ඣ M For Mature 17+ Due To Violence, Blood, Sexual Themes, Nudity, Drug Reference, Strong Language
Developer(s)
3909 LLC
Publisher(s)
3909 LLC
Platform(s)
Android, iOS, PC, PS Vita
How Long To Beat
5 Hours

Papers, Please tells the story of a fictional communist authoritarian regime in a country called Arstotzka modeled after a Cold Wa♏r-era Soviet Bloc state. There was even a short film created to go along with it, which tel🉐ls you how captivating of a story this game turned out to be.

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You're a border guard processing a long line of immigrants with a view of them outside the building, and you must carefully comb through all their documents and root out who's telling the truth and who's putting on a facade to get in, the latter getting arrested to undoubtedly face severe punishment. The job takes its toll, and that's what the game aims to convey, especially how 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:game designer Lucas Pope frames it all.

8 ౠ Before Your Eyes

Emotional Storytelling Through Blinking

Released
April 8, 2021 🌱
Publisher(s)
🔯 Skybound Games
Platform(s)
PC, Mobile, PS5
Developer
♊ GoodbyeWorld Games
How Long To Beat
2 Hours
Metascore
79

In order to advance the story of Before Your Eyes, you have to blink whenever a prompt featuring the icon of an eyeball with lashes pops up on your screen. This is one of the most inventive and original mechanics you can find in video game storytelling, and probably one you never would've imagined existing.

Before Your Eyes takes you on a short and poignant journey through the afterlife. You start on a boat being carried off by the Ferryman, and then you get to play through and reflect on moments in your life, almost like a life review. Every section involves you blinking where you're directed, and blinking at a metronome icon will jump you forward in time.

7 🌺 High On Life

A Sci-Fi Comedy FPS Where Your Weapons Are Your Voice

Released
ﷺ December 13, 2022
ESRB
M F🧔or Mature 17+ due to Violence, Blood and Gore, Sexual Themes, Use of Drugs, Strong Language, Crude Humor
Developer(s)
📖 ♛ Squanch Games
Publisher(s)
Squanch Games, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Xbox Game Studios
How Long To Beat
10 Hours
File Size Xbox Series
⭕ ൲ 57 GB (November 2023)

There are the basic first-person shooter games that give you the traditional high-octane set pieces and gunplay you expect, and then there's a game called 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:High On Life. From Squanch Games, a studio led by the creators of Rick and Morty, this sci-fi action-adventure FPS finds one of the most 🌞unique, hila🐠rious, and creative avenues to deliver its protagonist and story.

You're pretty much a high school graduate caught in an alien invasion by a species that means to harvest humans and turn them into drugs. You then become a silent bounty hunter who uses a species of talking alien firearms called Gatlians, which are voiced by comedians 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:like J.B♏. Smoove, Tim Robinson,ꦏ and Betsy Sodaro. The dialogue is all told through them.

6 Elsinore

An Unexpected Hamlet Video Game Adaptation Featuring Time Loops

Platform(s)

PC

Released

July 22, 2019

Developer(s)

Golden Glitch

Publisher

Golden Glitch

Genre(s)

Investigation, Point-and-click, Choice-based

You're probably familiar and have even read Shakespeare's play Hamlet, or seen the Kenneth Branagh film if you're a true buff. But you've never had it told quite lik🌠e the game Elsinore from developer Golden Glitch. Instead of playing the eponymous Shakespearean character in this version, you'll be investigating and interacting with the NPCs and story as Ophelia.

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168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The added twist to Elsinore is a⛦ time loop system, where the loop res෴ets every four in-game days, and yo🌠u can access events from the previous loop on a timeline chart to study them as part of the gameplay. The other element of this game is its "story simulation engine," which has the game respond to your social interactions and decisions with characters by significantly altering the course of events.

5 Indika

As Arthouse Of A Game As You Can Aim For

Released
May 8, 2024
ESRB
M For Mature 17+ D൲ue To Blood, Partial Nudity, Sexual Themes, Strong Language, Violence
Developer(s)
Odd Meter
Publisher(s)
11 Bit Studios 🔥
Engine
Un🦄real Engine 4
How Long To Beat
4 hours

If a game has trouble fitting into an exact genre category and the trailer turns to calling it "a subversive, self-endeavourous, multi-meta-layered, nun-perspective, conscience-driven, action answer seeker," you know you're in for a surreal and warped narrative experience. There's literally no game doing what Indika achieves in its short linear gameplay about a nun iꦫn alternate 19th-century Russia commuౠning with the devil.

It's like A24's Saint Maud and The Witch meets Neon's Immaculate, and you go from Plague Tale-style walking sim traversal and puzzles to a nun simulator to 2D-pixel art level design, with purposely weird fisheye camera close-ups of faces somewhere in between. The opening credits sequence itself is styled differently.

Oh, and you'll also get an interesting choice of sound design and see shrunken figures climbing out of a nun's mouth.

4 🐎 Immortality

A Most Thought-Provoking FMV Horror Game

4.5/5

Released
🗹 August 30, 2022 🐎
ESRB
🐭 M For Mature 17+ ܫDue To Violence, Blood, Sexual Content, Nudity, Use of Drugs, Strong Language
Developer(s)
🏅 Sam Barlow
Publisher(s)
𒊎 Half Mermaid Productions
How Long To Beat
7 Hours

With games like Her Story and Telling Lies, Sam Barlow has made a name for himself in game development as the FMV mystery auteur. And 2022's Immortality is perhaps his most unconventional and brilliantly Lynchian FMV endeavor 🥂yet. You're given clips from a series of three fictional feature film projects – Ambrosio, Minsky, and Two of Everything – along with their behind-the-scenes footage.

These films all have actress Marissa Marcel, who is not all she seems. To piece together the shocking story and get one brilliant meta-twist ending, you have to unlock and find all the hidden clips by interacting with objects in a scene 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:as well as scrub for♈ward or rewind them.

Soon, beings called The One and The Other will start appearing alongside Marcel, and things get very m💎ind-bending, creepy, and intrigui🧔ng from there.

3 What Remains Of Edith Finch ✨

Tragic, Whimsical, And Unconventional

Released
April 2🐲5, 2017 ꦐ
ESRB
T For Teen due to Violence, 🙈Blood, Drug Reference,𒀰 Language
Developer(s)
ᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚ 🍰 Giant Sparrow
How Long To Beat
2 Hours

What Remains of Edith Finch is one of the best walking simulator experiences you'll have because of the way this game unconventionally sets out to tell its story, throwing a nice little twist at the end of it as well. You start your journey with your mother's journal, which describes the tragic fates that befell generations of the Finch family tree.

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1

As you explore ꦿyour environment, which has na🐭rration text appearing throughout, you also get to live out the tragic and unusual deaths of the entire Finch family, playing with multiple perspectives, art styles, and level design. You could be inside a graphic novel, then swing fatally from a swing, and also transform from a child into a cat, then into an owl hunting a rabbit, and unexpectedly into a shark tumbling in the snow.

2 🔥 The Remedy Universe - Alan✱ Wake 2, Control, And Quantum Break

No One Juggles FMV With Seamless Third-Person Gameplay And Confusing Storylines Quite Like Remedy

5.0/5

Released
Octobe🥀r 27, 2023
ESRB
M For Mature 17+ Due To Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Nudity, Strong Language 💜
Engine
🔯 Northlight Engine 🐽
How Long To Beat
17 Hours
Metascore
90

Remedy's creative director and writer, Sam Lake, is a narrative genius who crafts some inventive and mind-bending stories, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:which are now part of t♛heir own multiverse.

Alan Wake 2 is as unconventional and meta of a survival horror game as you can get. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:It has ꦆa musical storytelling sequence tied to gameplay and live-action performance, enviro🉐nments that shift through a plot board, perspective puzzles that give story echo narrations, manuscripts that reveal future story events, and a DLC mission that blends mul🅰tiple video game genres. Even the jumpscares are unconventional.

Control has an even weirder supernatural sci-fi narrative where you go through a Metroidಞvania-like building called the Federal Bureau of Control and get some really puzzling lore, including demonstrative FMV clips from Dr. Casper Darling done in a Dharma Initiative way. And Quantꦗum Break is 💙a pure mind-bending quantum physics time travel story that has a live-action episodic miniseries built into it.

1 🔯 Death Stranding 𒉰

Even A24 Is A Major Fan Of This One

3.0/5

Released
🎉 November 8, 2019
ESRB
🎉 M for Mature: Blood, Intense Violence, Partial Nudity, Stron💦g Language
Engine
Decima
Cross-Platform Play
Yes! Players will share the same server as Steam and Epic users 🌳
Cross Save
yes
Franchise
Death Stranding🌜
Steam Deck Compatibility
yes
How Long To Beat
40 Hours
Release
𓆏 2022-03-30 (PC)
Metascore
85
PS Plus Availability
Extra & Premium ಞ

Nothing gets as incredibly weird, perplexing, and A24 as Hideo Kojima's Death Stranding in the Triple-A video game world, and A24 iꦅs even adapting it into a live-action film. By the time the credits roll, you might still have no idea what the story even is, nor wrap your head around some of the characters. Not even an 'ending explained' of all 'ending explained' would help you out here.

For a post-apocalyptic sci-fi game, Death Stranding is a very strange one in terms of storytelling and gameplay. You're a mysterious porter named Sam with your occupation and company being a part of your name, you have a connection to the President of the United States, a connection to an unborn 'Bridge Baby' that revives you via 'repatriation'. Urination can craft grenades, and there's a whole social strand system to connect with players that you don't see.

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