[ ADVENTURE ]
Small exploration game taking place in a club. Very bright, epilepsy warning indeed in effect.

[ ADVENTURE ]
The thrilling sequel to Will You Ever Return? and the best in the series. Sent to Hell immediately after killing the person from the first game, a man must defeat his inner sins.

[ ADVENTURE ]
A man dies, his only regret not being able to say goodbye to his love. Having been sent to Hell, he is promised the ability to speak with her once more by completing a Halloween ritual.

[ 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 ]
A pleasant exploration-adventure game.

[ ADVENTURE ]
Short absurdist point-and-click adventure game with multiple endings and thecatamites's wild writing and signature sense of humor.

[ 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 / RPG ]
A remake of an earlier game named Kinder. Shunsuke comes home from his grandparents' to find that the adults in his town have been slaughtered by a child with strange powers named Yuuichi, who forces the remaining children to play the "Friends Game." Kill the three Mistresses, and they will be freed. A strange RPG Maker game, with some frustrating sections, but ultimately quite good and worthwhile—at the very least for the incredibly funny sections and great music.

[ ADVENTURE / HORROR ]
Very short, jarring game about the fairness of being born at the expense of another. Use Flashpoint to play it. Full review on its page!

[ ADVENTURE / HORROR ]
Well-known Yume Nikki fan game about Sabitsuki, a girl who uses her computer to explore a world within her mind. It has dark medical themes and is more overtly horror-themed than Yume Nikki.

[ 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.

[ HORROR / PUZZLE ]
A mind-bending puzzle game with abstract solutions. It's also about cancer. Compare and contrast to Antichamber.

[ 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.

[ PLATFORMER ]
Atmospheric 2D platformer about a crash-landed alien getting their spaceship parts back.

[ 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.

[ 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.

[ ACTION / FIGHTING / STRATEGY ]
Phantom Dust is one of my favorite games, but nothing about it is easy to summarize or describe. Here goes anyway: An entirely amnesiac society has moved underground after a dust from space falls onto Earth that makes people lose their memories and eventually turn into violent monsters after enough exposure. A select few people dubbed Espers, though, can bend the dust to their will, weaponizing it while they scour the surface for fragments of their former society. When two Espers in storage pods are discovered and broken out of stasis, a conspiracy unravels regarding a shared memory everyone still has—a location known only as the Ruins. Gameplay-wise, players spend time between real-time battles with monsters and other Espers building their deck of attacks, defenses, and other miscellaneous abilities, which all end up shuffled and doled out at random mid-match. It's a one-of-a-kind mix of arena fighting and deck-building strategy that really does require players to consider what the best arsenal will be for each mission, as going in with the wrong skill set can certainly lead to absolute destruction. Despite bombing on its initial release on the Xbox (not my fault—I bought one!), it had a dedicated following on Xbox Live during its heyday and is now available on PC for free via the Microsoft Store.

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

[ 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.

[ SIMULATION ]
Japanese PS1 hot air balloon flying simulator. It has goals, but they're not particularly doable since your hot air balloon is mostly at the mercy of the winds, so it's mostly just a pleasant little exploration game. Customizable balloon colors!

[ ADVENTURE / HORROR ]
Bizarre point-and-click adventure game about an amnesiac waking up in the warped town of Harvest in the 1950s. Extremely violent, at times perverse, and full of nonsensical '90s adventure game logic.

[ ACTION / BEAT 'EM UP ]
Surrealist daymare of a 2D beat 'em up.

[ SIMULATION ]
The always acid-frazzled Timothy Leary has a DOS "video game" that's actually more of a psychoanalysis tool and it's about as weird as you'd think. Probably the least accessible thing on this list.