Shredded Conformist Viscera: A Selection of Avant-Garde and Experimental Gaming
A collection of games whose mechanics, story, or creation, accidentally or purposefully, push at the extreme peripheries of what is known as 'traditionally good game design principles' and become works that are borderline unrecognizable from games as we know them.
No visual novels, walking sims or bitsy games unless they are a genuine enigma within their genre.
No visual novels, walking sims or bitsy games unless they are a genuine enigma within their genre.
10 Games
A collection of puzzles whose solutions are so oblique and unintuitive that a solo playthrough is nigh impossible. Even finding out what the puzzle is to begin with is a puzzle in and of itself.
In which, to do anything within this game, you have to dick around in extremely specific places within the world that has zero indication of being game progress before OR AFTER YOU DO IT. Including one instance where you literally have to scream into the second-player microphone of the Famicom to progress.
THIS IS A ONE-PLAYER FUCKING GAME.
THIS IS A ONE-PLAYER FUCKING GAME.
A game whose mechanics are entirely reliant on the sound, eschewing visuals in most circumstances.
For all games that purport to defy genre or be polystylistic in nature, nothing comes as close as this game, whose individual segments are so disjointedly smashed together that it fails to resemble a singular game without the context of its original digital packaging. Not to mention that the controls vary quite a bit and the game gives you jack of shit in terms of ideas to progress.
Shout out one time to the as-of-yet unreleased sequel, whose footage is uncut and whose gameplay pacing is somehow more eccentrically esoteric than its prequel.
Shout out one time to the as-of-yet unreleased sequel, whose footage is uncut and whose gameplay pacing is somehow more eccentrically esoteric than its prequel.
A game where the objective is to have the game open for four minutes and thirty-three seconds while nobody else in the world has it open.
A game whose main mechanic was the online multiplayer story-crafting.
The player would find a bloodied man in an alley after a girl went missing. The response of the man would be a previous player submission, and you would then have to decide to spare or kill him. You would then be in the man's position, being questioned on what you did to the missing girl. You would then be emailed the ending of it, based on the following player's actions.
Exploits and spam of the game's servers would lead to it being shut down four years after it first released.
The player would find a bloodied man in an alley after a girl went missing. The response of the man would be a previous player submission, and you would then have to decide to spare or kill him. You would then be in the man's position, being questioned on what you did to the missing girl. You would then be emailed the ending of it, based on the following player's actions.
Exploits and spam of the game's servers would lead to it being shut down four years after it first released.
A straightforward JRPG where literally everything is written in a language of dashes and strokes that are unintelligible to most people.
A meta-game of 20 person telephone, in which 20 developers sequentially worked on games over the span of a half-year.
No communication was given between the parties involved other than a chain- once one developer finished a game, it would be sent to the next developer as the only basis for a follow-up.
No communication was given between the parties involved other than a chain- once one developer finished a game, it would be sent to the next developer as the only basis for a follow-up.
A platformer using stereogram illusions as the entirety of the visuals.
I can't make it work. :c
I can't make it work. :c
2 Comments
There's also an argument to be made for something like PainStation, though that may be closer in terms of design principles and differing more in incentives?
bad_news
11 months ago