I noticed this popped up on Steam recently. A quick glance at the reviews implies that people are blaming it on Undertale, lol. This looks much more like it’s riffing on the likes of Space Funeral, but Weird RPG Maker Games (and the like) have been around for quite a while (and let’s be real, Undertale totally falls into the genre, despite being made in a different program). I figure this would be a good place to talk about those games? Let me know if this belongs in a different category.
There’s a fishing rpg on itch.io, which looks pretty curious. I’ve always been interested in the concept of these, though I only know of the old River King series.
A personal favorite of mine (even among JRPGs in general) is a fangame of the Stardust Crusaders arc in the Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure manga. It’s ludicrously ambitious, and is still(?) being updated with new content. There’s a personality quiz that determines your stand, and the difference affects both combat and how cutscenes and side quests play out. There’s new game plus content that reaches as far as thirty cycles (though the most interesting stuff stops after cycle four or five). There’s a lot of really neat surprises hidden in the game, and you can even break away from canon in some significant ways, leading to lots of possible endings.
There’s also this. I have no idea what’s going on here.
Share whatever other weird projects you come across!
I was not aware of that engine! That is handy to know of. I guess this thread should be called Weird Indie RPGs In General but I’m hoping that it’s understood as that.
Palette is a pretty old RPG Maker game but I wanted to mention it because it eventually got its own PS1 release in Japan. I don’t know the amount of quality in the indie horror rpg genre, though this one appears to have some interesting setpieces. (Sorry for the commentary at the start of the video, it’s only at the start afaik)
I don’t know a thing about OFF but tumblr wouldn’t shut up about it for a hot minute. The aesthetic is neat and it’s French.
Everyone needs to play ramble planet, it’s not really an RPG despite being built in an RPG engine. Instead, it’s a scavanger hunt/puzzle game where even the combat is part of the scavanger hunt (if you’re not high enough to kill an enemy, you need to come back after finding and defeating enough lower level enemies; there is no death)
the main appeal is the world which is full of alien personality and surreal humour. it’s really really great. also it’s beautiful
I loved the hell out of this game. It’s just so chill and fun to explore. You can even end the game whenever you want (though you may get a bad rating if you do it too early).
Two problems is that it can suck early on in the game trying to find low level enemies, and the finding the last few pieces you need can be tricky too, but other than that, this was a great time. i put it on and relaxed after work with it for quite a while.
Hylics is great - I think like some other of these games a lot of it is kind of this exercise in half-recogniton, a sense of not knowing what’s happening or what anything does but still being able to vaguely glimpse enough genre contours underneath to still feel somewhat on track. It interests me because it highlights how vague our experiences with most of these games are and positions that vagueness as the main thing. Like when you read some standard villager dialogue in Final Fantasy or whatever and it sort of parses as just a couple of contextually relevant words jumping out from barely processed morass as filler, like the opening text to the first Zelda. CASTLE CASTLE NORTH WEST HONK HONK HONK. In Hylics the text (and the rest of the world) really is mangled to start with but it still kind of works, in the same way as a regular RPG, on the basis of cadence and pacing and a perpetual halfglimpsed sense of framing systems at play.
Some other games which do cool stuff with mangled half-sense:
Ghosts of Aliens (link) by Swordofkings128
Takes many cues on the first Mother game I think but has a good sense of unintelligible but earnest activity to it, not really ironic or anything so much as a sense that unintelligibility is just part of the package. Which I think is why it’s a lot more effective and endearing at dealing with that format than many more deliberate takes.
Um there are 2 versions of this game and an early one has the entire battle system basically nerfed and the other one does not and I highly recommend the former but don’t know which is contained in the link. Since it’s an RM2k3 game you can just open it in the editor if you have it and change everybody’s levels, though.
The music is really excellent and there’s a lot of it.
The same forum post that has the link also has a link to Homeland, which I haven’t played but vaguely remember as the first real attempt at this kind of “weird rpg maker” format that I know of in like western RM forms. Not completed though.
Bat Castle (link) by im9today
This is probably apothesis of what I’m talking about although also the most unbalanced and perverse of all 3 games, the opening 5 minutes or so are just this terrifying effort to understand enough of the game systems and language to avoid being instantly pulverised. Once that’s past it’s not quite that brutal again but save often… The language is this kind of slurred pastiche, as if it can barely muster the energy to maintain character and not just deteriorate into a series of terrible jokes, and the fact that it veers back and cross that line throughout is I think part of why the gameworld feels so unstable throughout while only just maintaining at least the sense of cohesion.
Other games which sort of depart even further from the rpg format (although never quite totally losing touch with it) incl all of JohnTCandy’s games which I recommend (Miracles Magpie is my favourite) (link by leon arnott of animatedscreenshots.tumblr!)
I like Embric of Wulfhammer’s Castle, but if ever a game required caveats, this is the one. The story literally takes place in somebody’s homebrew D&D setting, it starts off super slow, it’s got all kinds of problematic content, and, uh. Well, it’s a porn game. Minus like 75% of the pornography, which has been replaced by jokes. The reason I’m posting about it, though, is that this game is great at setting initial expectations and then exceeding them. The story branches and game complexity escalate sharply as the game nears its conclusion; there’s dozens of mutually exclusive endings. It’s also nice to finally have an RPG that demonstrates my preferred ratio of talking to exploration to combat.
I do not now recall how it was introduced to me, but something must have stood out about Visions & Voices to make me download it and keep it on my computer despite the intervening years of trouble and hardship. I never got very far.
