I played some Ecco The Dolphin last night. I just had this insatiable urge. It’s not even a good game imo, but the atmosphere just really sinks into me. It hits me in this “uncanny valley” area of my brain. The lifelessness and the ambient noise feel kind of punctuated by the disjointed text screens in a way that seems almost absurdist and it’s slightly unsettling. Anyway, I just got to wondering: what are some other games that generally give off a strange, lifeless, weird, or otherwise unsettling feeling, without necessarily intending to? Horror games exempt from this
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Actually I’ve been thinking about picking up Myst and its sequels again bc this fits my own description perfectly
it might sound weird, but mickey’s mousecapade has always had this factor for me. it might be because it’s a recognizable mascot character in a video game that has almost no resemblance to anything else that character is ever in, it might also be because it is surprisingly difficult and weird to play compared to other high profile nes games, or because i probably first played it when i was v. v. young, or maybe it’s just because the first level takes place in an insane multichambered wooden house with no discernible relationship to a structure that would or could ever exist in real life
idk
bug’s bunny’s birthday blowout is also kind of like this, but i played that game way too much so it no longer feels weird to me.
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the cyanworlds myst games are excellent but the only good non-cyanworlds myst was 4.
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Kingdom Hearts 2 is really eerie because all of the worlds are lifeless and empty, completely different from how towns are portrayed in most final fantasy and very different from the places portrayed in the movies
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going through the old 40-man raids in world of warcraft is really really eerie to me. you’re high enough level that none of the monsters will attack you, so it’s just like a weird museum.
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Max Payne (2001) has such a weird place in my memory as being really atmospherically strange in a way that didn’t seem entirely intentional. I remember the exterior levels being super eerie. I might be mis-remembering it, but I kind of vaguely remember being able to walk near a diner and being able to hear life from inside it, and thinking how bizarre it was for this blurry glimpse of civilisation to be seeping out into the game’s surroundings, which felt kind of post-human.
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I seem to remember playing a Duke Nukem game on the N64 that was mostly empty cityscaped sparsely populated by armed pigmen.
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Remedy is great at building enough mundane details to make compelling virtual spaces in a manner normally only Japanese games manage. They build diners and convenience stores almost as good as in a Yakuza or Shenmue game and this is why I’m happy Microsoft hasn’t let them die yet.
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Videogames are perfect vehicles of the uncanny. The only NES games that don’t feel this way are the ones that are super popular and famous.
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Oh my god, I’ve literally been saying this exact shit for years. Nobody knew what I meant when I ranted about KH2 feeling completely lifeless due to the general lack of NPCs and stuff. It’s just hallways with enemies interconnected by cutscenes where characters appear out of nowhere
The board is freaking out on me to apologies for the potential double post, but I didn’t want to lose this.
Yeah, Duke in general has these vibes but there’s something about the N64 one that amplifies the weirdness.
I feel like I’ve told this story a hundred times here over the past ten years, but the time I stumbled on an absurd number of corpses scattered around some standing stones a long walk from town in an otherwise pretty under populated Neverwinter Nights persistent world server with some steep death penalties was one of the creepiest gaming moments for me. I had somehow never found this spot before, and I was too freaked out to look for treasure, so I turned and ran.
When I did run into monsters out of town outside of quests, they were always different types and in new spots, so I had the sense that someone was occasionally slipping into DM mode and doing weird things behind the scenes. The stock quests were kind of boring so I’d go exploring, but as I ventured out, I always wondered I’d make myself a target for the server’s DM.
It hadn’t occurred to me before, but it was kind of a proto D Souls experience–that uneasy threat that on short notice you could go from facing manageable game AI to dealing with a malevolent player.
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Have you ever played Ecco 2? I’ve always felt the first was more claustrophobic, but the second really is just more bizarre all around. Like, you take a genesis representation of a city, and you apply that to a future dolphin city that you have no context for understanding and it’s really just a weird time all around.
(Ecco 2 owns)
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some indie deliberate non-horror examples:
goblet grotto
pretty much everything by cicadamarionette
cart life
starseed pilgrim
corrypt
probably more when I’m less tired
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I was gonna say, I think NES games in general felt like dream states to me growing up. A lot of SNES games too. Games were weird and I was a super sensitive kid so idk how I latched on to them so hard. Earthbound scared the shit out of me when I realized towns weren’t safe spaces, and when I was chased into a tunnel and a ghost accosted me, I immediately shut off the console.
I rarely catch that kind of feeling anymore. Last two uncanny valley feelings I can remember getting were finding the inflatable rabbit at sea in Saints Row 2 and the secret dungeon in FFXV.
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I just remembered Cactus exists
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CplmU0a4MU
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I feel like there must have been an old SB thread about horror vacuii in early 3d platformers, seems pertinent
bubsy’s back
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DK64 gave me super creepy vibes as a kid. It was one of the first N64 games I’d played, and consequently one of the first polygonal 3D games I’d played. Rare’s level design in their 3D platformers usually made little room for dialogue/NPCs. These wide open areas inhabited by cute + hostile creatures gave me nightmares as a kid. Also early 3D jankiness in general gave me nightmares
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