A collection of cool, off-beat, unique, or otherwise exemplary games. Formerly "Cool Weird Games", but lots of people think of "weird" as a negative (but IMO, more games should strive to be weird).
Not necessarily "alt games" but just cool, unique stuff you never thought you'd see. Many are free, all are worth your time.
Some are more experimental than others, I'll try and note whenever a game should be treated as such (very short, no ending, no goal, etc).
I'm SerTapTap, and my mission is to spread a love of games, particularly the hidden gems and underrated magic.
I've played through almost all of these games on my YouTube channel to give a visual quick look into new experiences. You can check out a playlist of Alt/Art games there.
A pure exploration game with no dialog! May take you a half hour-hour to find most things. Adorable pixel art style. Could have used music a bit better but when the music kicks in it's good.
My video:
A chill audioscape to float around in as you enjoy the music.
My Video:
A very 90s office simulator with lots of old tech and pop culture references. Oddly amusing extremely-low-fi sound effects. Surprisingly amusing. Takes about a half hour per playthrough.
My Video:
A chill ambience machine where you make the ambient music. And it sounds pretty good even if you're really bad at composing music! A perfect game to relax in.
My video:
An hour long comedy with a neat style adventure set in hell.
Baba Yaga.
A cool VERY tiny beach walk 'em up with chill music and some fun text.
A gloomy hellscape of a low-res world. No objective (that I saw), fun to wander around in for 10-30 minutes. Impressive asset resuse from Grave Apologies, you can see the basic structures in the earlier Grave Appologies but it feels like a whole different game. Very interesting and ominous.
My video:
Hoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo boy let me tell you how much I like walking.
be a weird spider.
Just hilarious.
A beautiful game based on figuring out a UI. It's much more interesting than that sounds
Stunning colors. Very, very small space to poke around in and nothing to "do", it's mostly worth a quick peek at it's aesthetic considering it's free.
Kinda makes me wish it were proc gen.
A slightly unnerving, very short text adventure-ish game where an old abandoned OS7 PC wants some totally not-creepy Sonic OC roleplay with you
A chill walk in the woods with grandma. Lovely art, sentimental and relaxing. Limited interaction but it has a story/ending.
A bit more interesting for it's idea than it's execution, Skeleton Flower has you undergo "desktop archeology" by viewing compressed (to 1 pixel) photos with (often broken) descriptions through a broken interface.
I find it a very interesting idea for a story telling method, but it's more experiment than anything. Still worth a few minutes if it sounds neat.
A very relaxing puzzler with lovely flat art and an extremely charming main character. You can even sit on benches, rest on the hedges or hug the snowman, making a very serene atmosphere.
A rather meaty walking sim/exploration game about being a refugee in a surreal/exaggerated world that gets it's point across quite well after initially seeming a bit weird-to-be-weird.
About a half hour/hour long
A fairly traditional hardish platformer (only the last 10 levels are particularly painful) with a lovely sense of humor and art style.
It's like a combat-free dive into the Item World in Disgaea, endless randomly generated tile maps with a nice aesthetic to admire.
A horror game with a neat low-fi/glitch aesthetic. Takes a while to pay off (~15 minutes of warm up), not very long but the last half is interesting.
Supershort walking sim with a neat 3D-Pixel look to it. Chill out with the ghosts of your past...or something
An unfinished "EP" or collection of games, but Summon the Apgrod is an adorable chill ghost bartending simulator worth a look for it's aesthetics and atmosphere. ORACLE is a simpler but still interesting procedural omen generation thinger. Interested to see how games 3 and 4 come out.
While I recommend playing the original first still, this is a neat sort of remake sort of spinoff of Yume Nikki, a famed Weird Game that uses it's added dimension to good effect.
A lovely, puzzling world that's more than a bit sinister, but not a jumpscare/die a lot horror game.
I don't think there's an ending, and the music is a little glitchy, but the art style of this one is great. Worth a wander.
Neat little planet simulator where you can watch the planet change over time and adjust parameters. Not a planet sim like Sim Earth but you get to see neat pixel planets evolve on their own.
Lovely lowfi rain effects in a cool weird world, but not much to see beyond that. Worth a spin for the rain though.
