Summary
If you’re a fan of beautifully shot films with unconventional and truly unforgettable stories that leave a lasting impression,such as those from A24and even Neon, you 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.
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.
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 withvery satirical choices that poke fun in a meta way.
9Papers, Please
A Gut-Wrenching, Narrative-Driven Simulation Game
Papers, Please tells the story of a fictional communist authoritarian regime in a country called Arstotzka modeled after a Cold War-era Soviet Bloc state. There was even a short film created to go along with it, which tells you how captivating of a story this game turned out to be.
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 howgame designer Lucas Popeframes it all.
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.
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 calledHigh On Life. From Squanch Games, a studio led by the creators of Rick and Morty, this sci-fi action-adventure FPS findsone of the most unique, hilarious, and creative avenuesto 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 comedianslike J.B. Smoove, Tim Robinson, and Betsy Sodaro. The dialogue is all told through them.
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 toldquite like 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.
The added twist to Elsinore is a time loop system, where the loop resets every four in-game days, and you 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.
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 whatIndikaachieves in its short linear gameplay about a nun in alternate 19th-century Russia communing 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.
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 hismost 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 sceneas well as scrub forward or rewind them.
Soon, beings called The One and The Other will start appearing alongside Marcel, and things get very mind-bending, creepy, and intriguing from there.
What Remains of Edith Finch isone of the best walking simulator experiences you’ll havebecause 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.
As you explore your environment, which has narration 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.
Remedy’s creative director and writer, Sam Lake, is a narrative genius who crafts some inventive and mind-bending stories,which are now part of their own multiverse.
Alan Wake 2 is as unconventional and meta of a survival horror game as you can get.It has a musical storytelling sequencetied to gameplay and live-action performance, environments 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 multiple video game genres. Even the jumpscares are unconventional.
Control has an even weirder supernatural sci-fi narrative where you go througha Metroidvania-like building called the Federal Bureau of Controland get some really puzzling lore, including demonstrative FMV clips from Dr. Casper Darling done in a Dharma Initiative way. And Quantum Break is a pure mind-bending quantum physics time travel story that has a live-action episodic miniseries built into it.
Nothing gets as incredibly weird, perplexing, and A24 as Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding in the Triple-A video game world,and A24 is 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’sa whole social strand system to connect with players that you don’t see.
