The video game experience is becoming more and more defined by the formulas of its predecessors, so much so that genres have become less distinguished by their tone and more by their agreements to tropes and gameplay styles. Is something a shooter? Is something an RPG? Is something a JRPG?
However, there are a few artistic video games that have dared to defy the conventions set upon them by labels. In some form or another, they’ve shifted their style to the point that they can only sort of be defined by a genre. Ultimately, each of these games sets out to either create a new style or something that could never be replicated.
10 The Witness
In a game like Tetris, players have to solve puzzles for points or to beat a timer. In Portal, it’s about trying to be more clever than the robotic villain. Jonathan Blow’s The Witness, however, has no obvious goal.
Its world is just full of panels with different puzzles, ones that make the player see the game world differently as they try to search for puzzles outside of the panels. There isn’t even an explicit goal. It’s not about getting better at puzzles or feeling clever. It’s about feeding one’s curiosity.
9 Undertale
Undertale takes huge inspiration from the pixelated RPGs of old that would put young warriors in large, strange worlds to fend off creatures and eventually fight the malevolent, main boss. Undertale is full of hostile creatures and bosses. However, instead of making combat the only go-to, it makes it a subtle option within a greater narrative.
The player can always talk to the monsters. They can just keep dodging attacks until the monsters get bored. They can always heal up to stay in the game. Fighting in this game is not mandatory. It is a choice to define one’s place within the monster’s world and the game itself.
8 Papers, Please
Gamers have done tedious tasks in video games before. They’ve matched candy with candy, mashed buttons to open doors, and grinded against boars to gain incremental experience points. While games have delved into tedium, few have ever truly embraced, that is, before Papers, Please.
Papers, Please is not a puzzle game or a simple simulation, but it is an endurance test putting one’s wrist movements and mind against a political clock. Failure means someone dying. Success means having to work again the next day, filing even more papers with even more filing restrictions and less time.
7 Journey
It’s hard to describe Journey without essentially just calling out elements of its aesthetic. It’s the game with hooded figures. People can meet one another but not all the time. Players just move forward but can also sing.
It seems simple enough on paper but that simplicity and the greater, almost intimidating expanse of Journey’s world have a way of working together. Journey doesn’t seek to impress with epic stories but quiet moments of contemplation and connection, where the player is far from the single, most important element in their world.
6 Baba Is You
As much as puzzle games want players to think outside the box, they typically function under the same boxes in each of their levels, albeit with a different coat of paint on them. Baba Is You is a puzzle game that truly asks you to get out of your own head.
In a world where Baba can really be anything, the potential for confusion is limitless. Depending on a player’s understanding of sentence structure, everything’s position on a screen, and what the goal is, Baba Is You almost plays as if the player is reprogramming the game.
5 Death Stranding
While most AAA games want to empower players with constant gunplay or fighting, Death Stranding used its budget to create the most detailed walking simulator/fetch quest game of all time.
Much like Journey, Death Stranding doesn’t try to impress with grand battles but by absorbing you within the tedium and harshness of just traversing its world. It’s only there that finding some means of connection can truly become meaningful and where its narrative truly lives.
4 Pathologic
Pathologic defied all barriers by challenging the notion that all video games have to be, as the cool kids put it, “fun.” In its gritty, poverty-ridden world, there isn’t any explicit reward to look for. There’s just surviving when seemingly everything is trying to kill the player.
Micromanaging resources just feels like choosing between bills. Fighting feels the mashing buttons to not get hurt as much. Exploring the narrative is like trying to analyze a mean inside joke. In an industry built on escapism, Pathologic breaks the mold by creating interactable anxiety.
3 The Beginner’s Guide
From the same creator as The Stanley Parable, The Beginner’s Guide is a walking simulator-esque game with lofty ambitions for a complex narrative. However, while The Stanley Parable reveled in the intricacies and futility of player choice, The Beginner’s Guide is a much more intimate experience that tries to use its world, narrator, and even the elements of game design and programming to tell a really unique tale.
Besides pulling a few levers every now and then, walking is pretty much the only thing that you will be doing. However, how you walk and what you see can change dramatically as the story goes on.
2 Her Story
Who knew search engines could be such a captivating gameplay mechanic? In one of the most unique detective games around, Her Story just has you watch old, interrogation videos to find clues.
The lady in the videos will just say something, and you will have to use whatever she said to find more interrogation videos in the game’s search engine. It’s there that you really sink into a deep rabbit hole. No one gets caught. There aren’t any points. The game just presents a flawed story, and you have to piece everything together one search term at a time.
1 Minecraft
Here’s a thinker: Is Minecraft actually a game? Are gamers actually playing within Minecraft or are they just working? Even when other players fight one another or blow up other people’s buildings and structures, they really don’t have to. Everyone is just placed within a certain space and is trusted to do anything. And, more so than most other games, Minecraft gives the players the capacity to do almost anything.
They can explore the world, search for rare resources, create great castles, or even somehow program a functioning Game Boy that can play Pokemon. Minecraft defies genre conventions by somehow being hard to classify as a conventional game. It just exists, and the players themselves can make their own experiences.
NEXT: 10 Minecraft Survival-Friendly Builds To Try
