These Surrealist Games Will Blow Your Mind (2024)

The video game medium gives players the opportunity to explore creative worlds only limited by a developer's imagination. While some fans love to see how technology can push the boundaries of realism in games, others prefer to dive into the surreal depths of a universe unbound by the rules of real life.

Video games are uniquely suited to tantalizing our senses in dynamic, interactive worlds and exploring different kinds of surrealism. Games like Psychonauts 2 give players psychic powers to dive into the human mind, while titles like Baldi's Basics use strange art styles to give players an uncanny discomfort.

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10 Psychonauts 2

Psychonauts 2

Surreal, cartoonish, funny, and scary, thePsychonautsfranchise is unique and dreamlike. The franchise is known for its bizarre levels, interesting characters, and mind-blowing visuals.

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In Psychonauts 2, players use their psychic powers to enter people's dreams and confront their hidden traumas. But the game's profound themes are wrapped around its whimsical and colorful dreamscapes. In one moment, the player explores an office building infested with giant teeth. In another, they're in a cooking game show where they have to cook the audience members.

Psychonauts 2's dream scenarios allowed its developer, Double Fine Productions, to create the kind of psychedelic and surreal visuals that most people only experience in their unconscious minds. The game is full of empathy but also leaves players wondering what hidden wounds lie dormant in their own friends and family.

9 Darkwood

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Darkwood is a hidden gem of a horror game released in 2017. It forces players to survive in a macabre world, drawn in a gritty, grungy art style. During the day, players scavenge a mysterious forest for supplies and items. But at night, players are confined to hideouts that they must defend from mysterious intruders.

Darkwood is designed to warp the player's perception. Maps and pathways change seemingly at random, leaving players confused and disoriented. Coupled with its heavy Lovecraftian atmosphere, Darkwood is a treat for all lovers of the creepy and crawly.

8 Superliminal

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Superliminal is a 2019 puzzle game that preys on humanity's psychological anxieties. Here, the player is trapped in a dream cycle and must solve puzzles in order to escape, with the help of a unique game mechanic. When players bring objects closer or farther away from themselves, they can make them grow or shrink permanently.

Superliminal is one of those games that makes the player think, "Wait, how did the developer do that?" It literally warps reality according to the player's perspective. Coupled with the game's sparse set pieces, players can feel lonely and disoriented in Superliminal, perfectly replicating the logic of barren dreams.

7 Takeshi's Challenge

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Takeshi's Challenge was released in 1986 for the NES. It was designed by Takeshi Kitano, a Japanese entertainer known for bizarre and surreal films like Violent Cop. Takeshi's Challenge embodies Kitano's cruel and dark sense of humor, as it toys with the player with its frustrating and seemingly random solutions that slow progress through the game to a crawl.

Takeshi's Challenge goes against every principle of game design, and it is probably impossible to complete without a walkthrough or immense trial and error. Worse, if the player character dies due to some unexpected event, it forces them to start the entire game all over again. Some might call it avant-garde but others might think of it as a frustrating dream where it's impossible to get anything done.

6 Jazzpunk

Jazzpunk is a psychedelic game full of setups and punchlines. After the player character swallows a whole bottle of pills, they're dropped into a vague mission to "infiltrate the consulate." The game's world itself is a cartoonish hodgepodge of pop art and psychedelia. But Jazzpunk is mostly about stumbling through its crowd of gaffs and gags.

Jazzpunk's jokes come at a mile a minute, and they never get stale, which is surreal in itself. Video games are not particularly known for being funny, and when they are, it's usually a side effect of a glitch or an absurd design decision. With that in mind, Jazzpunk is a true achievement in the video game medium.

5 Baldi's Basics in Education and Learning

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Baldi's Basics in Education and Learning is a parody horror game released in 2018. The game features low-res clip art characters and 3D models that look like they were rendered in Windows 98. This gives the game a very uncanny feeling, making it genuinely frightening when Baldi chases the player because they answered his questions incorrectly.

Baldi's Basics shows that an unusual visual style can tickle the player's brain in peculiar ways. The game is funny and offputting at the same time, making Baldi an unlikely icon in video game culture.

4 The Stanley Parable

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The Stanley Parable is a meta-narrative game that explores the nature of free will and player choices in video games. The player assumes the role of Stanley, an office worker who is forced to follow the whims of the game's cheeky, British narrator. The game is initially set in a drab office building with no one to be found, and Stanley only has the narrator to keep him company.

Stanley Parable's narrator is controlling, manipulative and very convinced of his own comedic talent. He mocks Stanley and the player as they try to escape the bizarre maze into the real world. Stanley himself has no voice and the game's soundtrack is very sparse, leaving players a bit hypnotized by The Stanley Parable's farcical commentary.

3 LSD: Dream Emulator

LSD: Dream Emulator is an experimental game released on the original PlayStation in 1998. The game was based on a dream diary kept by one of its developers. LSD has no real goals or objectives, making it more of an interactive experience than a typical video game.

In LSD: Dream Emulator, the player explores a landscape of psychedelic visuals, and they can touch objects that teleport them to other locations. As the player continues through the game, its dreamscapes become increasingly surreal, with twisting textures and colors. LSD is an early example of a video game that experimented with the medium to create something resembling a walk-through art exhibit.

2 The Eternal Castle

In The Eternal Castle, players crash land on a desolate, post-apocalyptic version of Earth, where the game's neon CGA-style graphics feel like radiation is oozing from the player's screen. The glaring backgrounds cast the game's platforms and characters in a black silhouette, like the shadows of a nuclear blast.

The most interesting "character" of The Eternal Castle is its world, full of creatures and mysteries. The game's bosses are biomechanical monstrosities tangled in decrepit wires and panels, creating truly intense encounters for the tiny player character. This is a game interpreted through an existential anxiety dream, where the world has turned against the dreamer.

1 Hylics

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Hylics is a lesser-known surrealist RPG that blends claymation and other art styles to create a fever dream of a video game. Based on its art, the game's auteur, Mason Lindroth, is a big fan of noodles. Here, the walls are noodles, the chairs are noodles, even the "people" are noodles.

Despite Hylics' proclivity for the intestinal, the game doesn't neglect its other shapes either. Blobs and crumples also play their roles. In all seriousness, if there was an abstract video game museum, Hylics would be in it, tucked away in a corner with all the other underappreciated masterpieces.

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