Games that feel like a fever dream

[rusty_shackleford]

For example, E.Y.E Divine Cybermancy
What are some other games that


I'm not sure if it can be done intentionally

[DrSneed]

The Void 2008

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I think this is only possible in very short games, as in under a few hours. Ie, The Stanley Parable or Amnesia A Machine for Pigs. The longer the game goes on, the player is going to get accustomed to any weirdness or shock. Ie Kingdom Hearts, Yakuza, Xeno series, Muv-Luv, etc.

[UltraFan123]

This is one of the relatively few JRPG titles I have seen that take direct inspiration from Judaism.

[Oyster Sauce]

I like these

[Tweed]

Ahhh! The French!





This weird TD game I pirated 10000 years ago.


Everything made by Zap Dramatic.

[Thor Kaufman]

Omikron

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzbKjSgvcdw

[fork]

[DemoGraph]

Baldurs gate 3

[adad]

https://store.steampowered.com/search/? ... r=etherane

Pick anything. The later it was released, the more on drugs it is.

[MrTwinkls]

Neverhood, Vangers, Zeno Clash, G String, etc. Many such games but it's hard to recommend a game with "feeling" cause it's different for everyone. Besides my actual fever dreams are just dynamic geometrical objects with impossible shapes.

[DemoGraph]

my actual fever dreams are just dynamic geometrical objects with impossible shapes.

Done!

[Tweed]

Battlespire felt like a fever dream to me because I had valley fever at the time when I played it. I got so sick that I thought I was going to die.

[Envuen]

Zelda's Adventure

[MrTwinkls]

my actual fever dreams are just dynamic geometrical objects with impossible shapes.

Done!

Yes. Or this.

[Tadeusz]

Bad Day on the Midway

[Thor Kaufman]

You were always such a kidder, fork.

[GhostCow]

This one takes the cake

[Demonic Fate]

+1 for the already named Zeno Clash and The Void.

Cruelty Squad is an obvious one. If you're an elderly millennial and have trouble understanding why zoomers liked that game, the Zero Punctuation review does a pretty good job of generational translation.

► Show Spoiler

Why do old people struggle to understand modern culture? Is it a memory thing? Like, if you've got too many memories of Chuck Berry and trousers with very high waistbands, there's no room to squeeze in any appreciation for fidget spinners? Or is it something physical that just happens one day, like your balls dropping or your first period, where some culture-appreciating part of your brain dies, and from then on, every new song you hear sounds like a microphone being held up to a fluorescent light? See, I always thought it was just that as you get older, you retreat more from general society and lose touch with the common cultural references that allow us to relate to new trends.

But there are moments that make me wonder, like when everyone and their toupées were nagging me to try Cruelty Squad, whose screenshots on the Steam page immediately made me think, "Are they taking the ****?" It's all clashing colors and PS1-era 3D models with worse animation than the little dudes on a foosball table, and environments that look like someone opened the level editor and then threw their laptop out the window of a speeding bus, and texture work that looks like the brooms from The Sorcerer's Apprentice got set loose in a water-damaged gift-wrap shop, and an interface that looks like it got molested inside a crowded novelty photo booth at a juggalo convention, complete with a health meter that takes up an entire quarter of the active screen and looks like an untreated hernia, etc., etc.

But there had to be something more to Cruelty Squad. An "Overwhelmingly Positive" rating on Steam after two thousand reviews goes a bit beyond taking the ****; that would require a complex, organized ****-taking effort, and I think the troll brigade used up all their ****-taking energy with the GameStop thing. So I gave it a try, and I can almost guarantee that you, too, will be confused by the appeal of Cruelty Squad on your first attempt, if you can even decipher the ******* mission select screen, which is like examining a pile of vomit to figure out what specific carrot that orange bit came from.

You'll then start the first mission, walk into a room, and get immediately shot to death by an enemy who looked, at first glance, exactly the same as all the non-hostile NPCs you're not supposed to shoot. Then, you try again and shoot the enemy who shot you last time, whereupon fifteen of his mates pour into the room and juice you like an overripe orange. And this is on top of the game looking like MS Paint neon prolapse, and the MIDI music that sounds like the soundtrack from a 90's adventure game about being inside the mind of Nick Cave. You'll probably kick it in the head after that, and no one would blame you, but if you're anything like me, something will make you go back.

At first, I thought, "Well, it's just a troll game, isn't it? Kids of today, acting like they invented troll games. The Newgrounds era wasn't that long ago!" But you know something? Troll games are kind of my jam, like those mods people used to make for Half-Life that replaced the textures and sound effects with memes and the voice lines with fifteen-year-olds yelling cuss words way too close to the mic. I love **** like that; it's amateurish and obnoxious to play, but it expresses something that no other form of art does. It's the equivalent of graffiti: an irreverent expression from an unheard voice defiantly skating on the knife-edge of acceptability, often darkly hilarious, if only metatextually from the thought that someone made it and uploaded it, and I downloaded it, and then wasted an hour on it that I could've spent reading William Makepeace Thackeray.

But when I went back to Cruelty Squad to assess it from that angle, I discovered there's a perfectly playable game here once you figure the basics out and get past the visual vomit and aural catarrh. It calls itself an "immersive sim", and I've never been entirely clear on what defines one of those; I think it might just be any game where you crawl down air vents a lot. It's a mission-based assassination game where you get to your targets, skillfully use the contents of their skulls to reduce local property prices, then return to the exit, all while keeping an eye out for guards, 'cos you die faster than a dumb blonde joke at a lesbian wedding reception and there are no mid-mission saves, so you have to start all over again. But then again, the enemies die faster than Adolf Hitler doing a set at a lesbian wedding reception, and they don't even get to restart the mission, so maybe you should check your ******* privilege!

At its core, it's a game about carefully advancing, peeking around corners, and getting the drop on the enemy with precise headshots, and once you've found some of the weapons that don't suck as hard as their "looking like massively overused sections of sewage pipework" would imply, then it plays perfectly efficiently. And hey, the environments might look like they were carved out of the world's least appetizing potatoes with a child's plastic beach implements, but the same was true of the first two Thief games, and we somehow got over it. Not that I'm saying the game should get a pass for being retro-styled; even in retro times, games didn't go out of their way to look like the top of an overused salad cream bottle. This doesn't feel like a game from retro times; it feels like an expression of nihilistic frustration bubbling up from the morass of modern society, and its deliberate hideousness is part of that effect.

The story of the game is that you are an empty shell of a person in a dystopian cyberpunk world where I guess everyone got their sense of aesthetics shot off in the water-wars, assassinating key targets because your corporate masters told you to. Your targets are never characterized or given any dialogue; you just kill them and **** off. Neither they nor any nearby NPCs seem particularly surprised when the murder starts; this is just the world everyone lives in. Hell, our own agency marks us for death in one mission, and we have to escape a police raid on our apartment building. In other immersive sims, this would've been a turning point in the plot, like when you betray your agency in Deus Ex, or that bit in Thief 4 where you finally wise up and stop playing Thief 4, but no; you just glumly go back to work the next day 'cos it was a bureaucratic fuckup, and there's nothing sufficiently humanlike in the world that you could possibly complain about it to.

Get through the missions, and you'll have played a decent enough, if simplistic assassination game, but this is only scratching the acne-riddled surface of Cruelty Squad; fully explore all the levels, and you'll descend down a surreal rabbit hole of psychedelic secret areas and unlockables. As for whether I like or recommend the game, that's the wrong attitude; sure, I can criticize it for looking like garbage and its many unintuitive design choices - that grappling hook ability that completely alters the way you move around could've been introduced with more ceremony - but you know what? I don't think Cruelty Squad cares.

It's an experience like having a bad acid trip while already blitzed out on weed, so all you can do is numbly zone out and stare into space as reality collapses about your ears. And it's worth a look just to explore that headspace; spend a little time in a nihilistic funk where life is one long, bleak joke at humanity's expense, then snap out of it and get back to work at the Amazon warehouse.

[A Chinese opium den]

Cruelty Squad is an obvious one. If you're an elderly millennial and have trouble understanding why zoomers liked that game, the Zero Punctuation review does a pretty good job of generational translation.

► Show Spoiler

Why do old people struggle to understand modern culture? Is it a memory thing? Like, if you've got too many memories of Chuck Berry and trousers with very high waistbands, there's no room to squeeze in any appreciation for fidget spinners? Or is it something physical that just happens one day, like your balls dropping or your first period, where some culture-appreciating part of your brain dies, and from then on, every new song you hear sounds like a microphone being held up to a fluorescent light? See, I always thought it was just that as you get older, you retreat more from general society and lose touch with the common cultural references that allow us to relate to new trends.

But there are moments that make me wonder, like when everyone and their toupées were nagging me to try Cruelty Squad, whose screenshots on the Steam page immediately made me think, "Are they taking the ****?" It's all clashing colors and PS1-era 3D models with worse animation than the little dudes on a foosball table, and environments that look like someone opened the level editor and then threw their laptop out the window of a speeding bus, and texture work that looks like the brooms from The Sorcerer's Apprentice got set loose in a water-damaged gift-wrap shop, and an interface that looks like it got molested inside a crowded novelty photo booth at a juggalo convention, complete with a health meter that takes up an entire quarter of the active screen and looks like an untreated hernia, etc., etc.

But there had to be something more to Cruelty Squad. An "Overwhelmingly Positive" rating on Steam after two thousand reviews goes a bit beyond taking the ****; that would require a complex, organized ****-taking effort, and I think the troll brigade used up all their ****-taking energy with the GameStop thing. So I gave it a try, and I can almost guarantee that you, too, will be confused by the appeal of Cruelty Squad on your first attempt, if you can even decipher the ******* mission select screen, which is like examining a pile of vomit to figure out what specific carrot that orange bit came from.

You'll then start the first mission, walk into a room, and get immediately shot to death by an enemy who looked, at first glance, exactly the same as all the non-hostile NPCs you're not supposed to shoot. Then, you try again and shoot the enemy who shot you last time, whereupon fifteen of his mates pour into the room and juice you like an overripe orange. And this is on top of the game looking like MS Paint neon prolapse, and the MIDI music that sounds like the soundtrack from a 90's adventure game about being inside the mind of Nick Cave. You'll probably kick it in the head after that, and no one would blame you, but if you're anything like me, something will make you go back.

At first, I thought, "Well, it's just a troll game, isn't it? Kids of today, acting like they invented troll games. The Newgrounds era wasn't that long ago!" But you know something? Troll games are kind of my jam, like those mods people used to make for Half-Life that replaced the textures and sound effects with memes and the voice lines with fifteen-year-olds yelling cuss words way too close to the mic. I love **** like that; it's amateurish and obnoxious to play, but it expresses something that no other form of art does. It's the equivalent of graffiti: an irreverent expression from an unheard voice defiantly skating on the knife-edge of acceptability, often darkly hilarious, if only metatextually from the thought that someone made it and uploaded it, and I downloaded it, and then wasted an hour on it that I could've spent reading William Makepeace Thackeray.

But when I went back to Cruelty Squad to assess it from that angle, I discovered there's a perfectly playable game here once you figure the basics out and get past the visual vomit and aural catarrh. It calls itself an "immersive sim", and I've never been entirely clear on what defines one of those; I think it might just be any game where you crawl down air vents a lot. It's a mission-based assassination game where you get to your targets, skillfully use the contents of their skulls to reduce local property prices, then return to the exit, all while keeping an eye out for guards, 'cos you die faster than a dumb blonde joke at a lesbian wedding reception and there are no mid-mission saves, so you have to start all over again. But then again, the enemies die faster than Adolf Hitler doing a set at a lesbian wedding reception, and they don't even get to restart the mission, so maybe you should check your ******* privilege!

At its core, it's a game about carefully advancing, peeking around corners, and getting the drop on the enemy with precise headshots, and once you've found some of the weapons that don't suck as hard as their "looking like massively overused sections of sewage pipework" would imply, then it plays perfectly efficiently. And hey, the environments might look like they were carved out of the world's least appetizing potatoes with a child's plastic beach implements, but the same was true of the first two Thief games, and we somehow got over it. Not that I'm saying the game should get a pass for being retro-styled; even in retro times, games didn't go out of their way to look like the top of an overused salad cream bottle. This doesn't feel like a game from retro times; it feels like an expression of nihilistic frustration bubbling up from the morass of modern society, and its deliberate hideousness is part of that effect.

The story of the game is that you are an empty shell of a person in a dystopian cyberpunk world where I guess everyone got their sense of aesthetics shot off in the water-wars, assassinating key targets because your corporate masters told you to. Your targets are never characterized or given any dialogue; you just kill them and **** off. Neither they nor any nearby NPCs seem particularly surprised when the murder starts; this is just the world everyone lives in. Hell, our own agency marks us for death in one mission, and we have to escape a police raid on our apartment building. In other immersive sims, this would've been a turning point in the plot, like when you betray your agency in Deus Ex, or that bit in Thief 4 where you finally wise up and stop playing Thief 4, but no; you just glumly go back to work the next day 'cos it was a bureaucratic fuckup, and there's nothing sufficiently humanlike in the world that you could possibly complain about it to.

Get through the missions, and you'll have played a decent enough, if simplistic assassination game, but this is only scratching the acne-riddled surface of Cruelty Squad; fully explore all the levels, and you'll descend down a surreal rabbit hole of psychedelic secret areas and unlockables. As for whether I like or recommend the game, that's the wrong attitude; sure, I can criticize it for looking like garbage and its many unintuitive design choices - that grappling hook ability that completely alters the way you move around could've been introduced with more ceremony - but you know what? I don't think Cruelty Squad cares.

It's an experience like having a bad acid trip while already blitzed out on weed, so all you can do is numbly zone out and stare into space as reality collapses about your ears. And it's worth a look just to explore that headspace; spend a little time in a nihilistic funk where life is one long, bleak joke at humanity's expense, then snap out of it and get back to work at the Amazon warehouse.

Yes but its ******* ugly. Do all of these people just not care that they are playing an intentionally ugly piece of visual media? If someone made the worlds tastiest meal but it looked exactly like someone took a **** on the plate, you'd have to assume everyone who tried it is a ******. A chef that made the worlds tastiest meal to look like a **** must also be a ******. Good things should look good, not bad.

[Demonic Fate]

Cruelty Squad is an obvious one. If you're an elderly millennial and have trouble understanding why zoomers liked that game, the Zero Punctuation review does a pretty good job of generational translation.

► Show Spoiler

Why do old people struggle to understand modern culture? Is it a memory thing? Like, if you've got too many memories of Chuck Berry and trousers with very high waistbands, there's no room to squeeze in any appreciation for fidget spinners? Or is it something physical that just happens one day, like your balls dropping or your first period, where some culture-appreciating part of your brain dies, and from then on, every new song you hear sounds like a microphone being held up to a fluorescent light? See, I always thought it was just that as you get older, you retreat more from general society and lose touch with the common cultural references that allow us to relate to new trends.

But there are moments that make me wonder, like when everyone and their toupées were nagging me to try Cruelty Squad, whose screenshots on the Steam page immediately made me think, "Are they taking the ****?" It's all clashing colors and PS1-era 3D models with worse animation than the little dudes on a foosball table, and environments that look like someone opened the level editor and then threw their laptop out the window of a speeding bus, and texture work that looks like the brooms from The Sorcerer's Apprentice got set loose in a water-damaged gift-wrap shop, and an interface that looks like it got molested inside a crowded novelty photo booth at a juggalo convention, complete with a health meter that takes up an entire quarter of the active screen and looks like an untreated hernia, etc., etc.

But there had to be something more to Cruelty Squad. An "Overwhelmingly Positive" rating on Steam after two thousand reviews goes a bit beyond taking the ****; that would require a complex, organized ****-taking effort, and I think the troll brigade used up all their ****-taking energy with the GameStop thing. So I gave it a try, and I can almost guarantee that you, too, will be confused by the appeal of Cruelty Squad on your first attempt, if you can even decipher the ******* mission select screen, which is like examining a pile of vomit to figure out what specific carrot that orange bit came from.

You'll then start the first mission, walk into a room, and get immediately shot to death by an enemy who looked, at first glance, exactly the same as all the non-hostile NPCs you're not supposed to shoot. Then, you try again and shoot the enemy who shot you last time, whereupon fifteen of his mates pour into the room and juice you like an overripe orange. And this is on top of the game looking like MS Paint neon prolapse, and the MIDI music that sounds like the soundtrack from a 90's adventure game about being inside the mind of Nick Cave. You'll probably kick it in the head after that, and no one would blame you, but if you're anything like me, something will make you go back.

At first, I thought, "Well, it's just a troll game, isn't it? Kids of today, acting like they invented troll games. The Newgrounds era wasn't that long ago!" But you know something? Troll games are kind of my jam, like those mods people used to make for Half-Life that replaced the textures and sound effects with memes and the voice lines with fifteen-year-olds yelling cuss words way too close to the mic. I love **** like that; it's amateurish and obnoxious to play, but it expresses something that no other form of art does. It's the equivalent of graffiti: an irreverent expression from an unheard voice defiantly skating on the knife-edge of acceptability, often darkly hilarious, if only metatextually from the thought that someone made it and uploaded it, and I downloaded it, and then wasted an hour on it that I could've spent reading William Makepeace Thackeray.

But when I went back to Cruelty Squad to assess it from that angle, I discovered there's a perfectly playable game here once you figure the basics out and get past the visual vomit and aural catarrh. It calls itself an "immersive sim", and I've never been entirely clear on what defines one of those; I think it might just be any game where you crawl down air vents a lot. It's a mission-based assassination game where you get to your targets, skillfully use the contents of their skulls to reduce local property prices, then return to the exit, all while keeping an eye out for guards, 'cos you die faster than a dumb blonde joke at a lesbian wedding reception and there are no mid-mission saves, so you have to start all over again. But then again, the enemies die faster than Adolf Hitler doing a set at a lesbian wedding reception, and they don't even get to restart the mission, so maybe you should check your ******* privilege!

At its core, it's a game about carefully advancing, peeking around corners, and getting the drop on the enemy with precise headshots, and once you've found some of the weapons that don't suck as hard as their "looking like massively overused sections of sewage pipework" would imply, then it plays perfectly efficiently. And hey, the environments might look like they were carved out of the world's least appetizing potatoes with a child's plastic beach implements, but the same was true of the first two Thief games, and we somehow got over it. Not that I'm saying the game should get a pass for being retro-styled; even in retro times, games didn't go out of their way to look like the top of an overused salad cream bottle. This doesn't feel like a game from retro times; it feels like an expression of nihilistic frustration bubbling up from the morass of modern society, and its deliberate hideousness is part of that effect.

The story of the game is that you are an empty shell of a person in a dystopian cyberpunk world where I guess everyone got their sense of aesthetics shot off in the water-wars, assassinating key targets because your corporate masters told you to. Your targets are never characterized or given any dialogue; you just kill them and **** off. Neither they nor any nearby NPCs seem particularly surprised when the murder starts; this is just the world everyone lives in. Hell, our own agency marks us for death in one mission, and we have to escape a police raid on our apartment building. In other immersive sims, this would've been a turning point in the plot, like when you betray your agency in Deus Ex, or that bit in Thief 4 where you finally wise up and stop playing Thief 4, but no; you just glumly go back to work the next day 'cos it was a bureaucratic fuckup, and there's nothing sufficiently humanlike in the world that you could possibly complain about it to.

Get through the missions, and you'll have played a decent enough, if simplistic assassination game, but this is only scratching the acne-riddled surface of Cruelty Squad; fully explore all the levels, and you'll descend down a surreal rabbit hole of psychedelic secret areas and unlockables. As for whether I like or recommend the game, that's the wrong attitude; sure, I can criticize it for looking like garbage and its many unintuitive design choices - that grappling hook ability that completely alters the way you move around could've been introduced with more ceremony - but you know what? I don't think Cruelty Squad cares.

It's an experience like having a bad acid trip while already blitzed out on weed, so all you can do is numbly zone out and stare into space as reality collapses about your ears. And it's worth a look just to explore that headspace; spend a little time in a nihilistic funk where life is one long, bleak joke at humanity's expense, then snap out of it and get back to work at the Amazon warehouse.

Yes but its ******* ugly. Do all of these people just not care that they are playing an intentionally ugly piece of visual media? If someone made the worlds tastiest meal but it looked exactly like someone took a **** on the plate, you'd have to assume everyone who tried it is a ******. A chef that made the worlds tastiest meal to look like a **** must also be a ******. Good things should look good, not bad.

I imagine it's like the intentional use of dissonant chords in music: it's unpleasant and oddly unnerving because the message is meant to be "[thing being accompanied by the music] is not good, it is very bad".

I occasionally listen to Deathspell Omega, they're very harsh and exhausting (if musically very competent), but it works very well with the whole concept of their albums and general philosophy, which is more or less "IRL Nurgle cult, minus the cheerfulness". So I'd never put them on to relax or unwind, but their albums are still a better work of art this way than if they played nice, beautiful music while singing about how the world is hell and we're all just doomed rotting sacks of meat.

It's like Bioshock 1/2 vs. Infinite. In both games ((Levine)) wanted to say that those settings were horrible no good places you should hate, but while in BS1 it kinda worked because after the initial bathysphere cutscene you got dumped into moldy gloomy corridors full or horrors, in BSI the whites-only floating city looks like an extremely beautiful place in which to live so the message is entirely subverted unless you were a proto-BLM type who already hated that aesthetics.

[Tweed]

I remember another title that can only be described as a fever dream.

[WrenchWring]

[logincrash]

I remember being underlevelled and unprepared, playing through the desert region of the GW2 Mount expansion. Trying to fight my way through scores of scorpions and ****, surviving by the skin of my teeth.
I felt almost delirious after an hour or two of this, writing about the treacherous desert in the guild chat. I was playing the Deadeye spec of the Rogue class, so it was just me and my rifle against the harsh conditions and constant canyon ambushes.
That day genuinely felt like a fever dream.

[WhiteShark]

[Tweed]

[TKVNC]

Project Nomads

[rusty_shackleford]

I think a lot of these were created to be like it so they don't actually feel like it. Maybe if the writer was good enough