[ ADVENTURE / INT FIC ]
A companion piece to the serial experiments lain anime, in which a girl named Lain is troubled by nightmares and signs of mental illness—including hallucinations, delusions, and depersonalization. Her story is told through audio clips of diary entries, counseling logs, and diagnostic reports. Despite the difficult UI, it's actually easier to follow than the anime, and is a bit more grounded, though it's also much darker. Playable in-browser with subtitles.

[ ADVENTURE / HORROR ]
A large collaborative Yume Nikki fan game in which players must guide Urotsuki, a girl who won't leave her room, through her dreams.

[ ADVENTURE / HORROR ]
A lone tree acts as a microcosm of the world, but by sustaining itself on water alone, the world has stagnated and not much is left of life. The player is tasked with changing the future by mixing the water with another substance in this surreal and dark adventure game with multiple endings. 5th-generation-style graphics.

[ ADVENTURE / HORROR ]
Destroy objects that seem out of place. They are parasites. Remove them.

[ ADVENTURE ]
Explore peaceful, procedurally-generated islands.

[ ADVENTURE / HORROR ]
You're a sardine, and you're faced with a choice: up, or down? And will you stick to your guns?

[ ADVENTURE ]
A post-modern PS1 adventure game, now available in English on Switch. The "hero" of Love-De-Gard leaves a trail of destruction in his wake, and it's up to players to follow him, setting his wrongs right again. Collect Love to increase your Love Level, which allows you to perform more actions throughout each day.

[ RPG ]
Funny and fairly short RPG about a sad man and a horse made of legs who go on an adventure to prevent the world they live in from becoming corrupted by glitches.

[ ADVENTURE ]
An exploration game contemplating the nature of life and everything, with some very interesting dialogue taken from a lecture by the late Alan Watts. Game mechanics revolve around taking control of various creatures and inanimate objects.

[ ACTION / MUSIC / SHOOT 'EM UP / VR OPTIONAL ]
A really good rail shooter with a Y2K aesthetic and a cool scoring system based on how many bullets you can target enemies with at once. I had initially passed this up for inclusion on the list, despite its somewhat abstract enemies and setting. After completing the base game and the new Area X, it seemed like it was just barely not "out there" enough to add. Unlocking the "Trance Mission" mode tilted my opinion into the other direction, though—an abstract, glitch-aesthetic endless mode scored by Oval, with enemies you can shoot at but don't present a danger. It's certainly the most fitting part of the game in regards to this list, and should please fans of abstract experiences (especially those with VR headsets).

[ ADVENTURE / HORROR ]
Surreal exploration game about a girl trying to escape the mental torment of her abusive father. Extremely bleak. Would eventually get two sequel RPGs: LISA the Painful and LISA the Joyful. Only LISA the First is on here, but I highly recommend all three to those who can handle their themes.

[ ADVENTURE / MUSIC ]
Exploration game featuring the music of Radiohead's Kid A and Amnesiac albums, as well as visuals from and inspired by them.

[ ADVENTURE ]
An early Japanese exploration game for the PS1. Explore dreams in a series of environments that shift textures and contain chance events.

[ RPG ]
Surreal claymation RPG adventure in which the moon-headed Wayne quests to meet Gibby, King of the Moon.

[ PLATFORMER / PUZZLE ]
Surreal puzzle-platformer with non-standard solutions and impossible geometry.

[ RPG ]
Cult classic RPG that became huge on Tumblr for a while and still maintains an active fanbase. The Batter embarks on a mission to purify the four Zones, small hubs of a strange and surreal world.

[ ADVENTURE / INT FIC / PUZZLE ]
Point-and-click adventure game in the form of a era sleep-time operating system, taking place in 1999 into 2000. Patrol Hypnospace as a community moderator and issue takedowns and warnings to its users. Delightfully funny, charming, and unique while flawlessly mixing the essences of early and modern Internet communities.

[ ACTION / ACTION-ADVENTURE / FPS/TPS ]
Harman Smith and his assassin personalities—collectively known as the killer7—take on the Heaven Smile, a terrorist organization of suicide-bombing mutants. Low-poly, cel shaded, and as stylish as the PS2 gets (though I'd recommend the PC port). Players traverse each level with limited movement in the third person, and must switch to first-person shooting mode when enemies arrive. There's lots of environmental puzzle solving as well. It's a hard one to get into, and I wouldn't exactly call the gameplay riveting, but killer7 is a rewarding experience for those willing to stick with it and pay attention. If you need content warnings for media, though, maybe look into those first.

[ ADVENTURE / HORROR ]
Cult classic exploration game in which players explore the dream worlds of Madotsuki, who refuses to leave her room. Find "effects" laying around, encounter chance events, meet interesting characters. Slow gameplay, practically no dialogue, pretty surreal.

[ ADVENTURE / INT FIC ]
Short psychological visual novel in which you must help a girl buy milk.

[ PLATFORMER / PUZZLE ]
When the King of All Cosmos goes on a drunken bender and destroys all the stars in the sky, the little Prince must take his katamari and roll up objects on Earth with it, creating stars in the process. A very not-indie entry into the list, and certainly one of the least "arthouse" games here, but its outlandish absurdism, its unique control scheme, and my favoritism all conspire to include it here.

[ PLATFORMER ]
Shortly after the events of the first Psychonauts game, and immediately after the events of (the optional) Psychonauts in the Rhombus of Ruin, Raz finds himself caught up in a conspiracy regarding an unknown traitor in the midst of the Psychonauts's headquarters: The Motherlobe. Released ~15 years after the first game, Psychonauts 2 is a miracle. It successfully captures the tone and heart of the first game, demonstrating a deep understanding of what made it special to a lot of people. Just as special (and weird!) as the first game.

[ PLATFORMER ]
Psychonauts: the commercial-flop-turned-cult-classic. When I first made this list, I passed the Psychonauts games over despite them being favorites of mine—mostly because they don't really deviate from the kind of gameplay and mechanics one would expect from pretty much any other 3D collect-a-thon platformers. I couldn't get that decision out of my head, though—after all, it'd be a lie to say that Psychonauts isn't a little bit off the beaten path. It's a game with a weird and sometimes dark sense of humor about a circus boy named Raz who sneaks off to psychic summer camp, eventually uncovering a sinister plot involving the theft of brains by one of the camp's mentors. Much of the game takes place inside people's minds, and the levels get really surreal and imaginative, which pairs well with the occasionally absurd dialogue delivered by fantastic characters. The whole thing is super charming, and still holds up really well.

[ ADVENTURE ]
Well-known post-modern adventure game about the relationship between the player, their avatar, the game's developer, and the game's narrator. Brilliant dialogue and voice acting. Though others have tried to replicate its wit, few are clever enough to succeed.

[ ACTION-ADVENTURE ]
Embark on a quest to reconnect America after it is left in ruin by the effects of the Death Stranding—a world-scale event that connected the world of the dead with the world of the living. I was hesitant to include a triple-A game on this list, but it has just the right amount of exploratory gameplay, surrealist elements, and general weirdness to fit right in with the others.