Letting players step into the role of a Big Daddy sounds like a bold twist, but BioShock 2 quickly shows why that fantasy wears thin. Playing as Subject Delta means repeating the same loop over and over: escort a Little Sister, harvest ADAM, fight rival Big Daddies, then brace for a Big Sister ambush. What should feel powerful and terrifying instead turns routine, making life inside those massive boots surprisingly dull. | © 2K Marin
As one of the few 2D games on the N64, Mischief Makers drops players into levels made of living, talking blocks and never bothers to explain why they exist. The story loosely mirrors Star Wars if all the logic were stripped out, leaving behind a jumble of heroes, villains, and motivations that barely connect. Gameplay only adds to the confusion, jumping from riding bees to dodgeball with cats to violently shaking everything in sight, all with total confidence that none of this needs explaining. | © Treasure
By ditching straightforward action for a vague open-world structure, Castlevania II: Simon's Quest turns progress into a guessing game. Advancement depends on bizarre, counterintuitive solutions that the game barely explains, often hiding crucial steps behind trial-and-error rituals. The unhelpful, badly translated villagers only make things worse, offering misleading clues that somehow feel less informative than total silence. | © Konami
On paper, The Order: 1886 sounds wild in the best way: Arthurian knights, steampunk London, and gunfights against werewolves and vampires. In practice, the game leans hard on visuals and mood while delivering a short campaign packed with quick-time events and very little room to breathe or play. The result feels less like the start of a bold new franchise and more like an extended tech demo that never quite becomes the game it promised to be. | © Ready at Dawn
Brütal Legend feels like a love letter to heavy metal that somehow forgot what genre it wanted to be. Beneath the fun characters and solid story sits a risky mix of action and console-friendly real-time strategy that never fully clicks, especially once large-scale battles take over. Nothing is outright broken, yet the whole experience carries the odd sense of a game that aimed for epic and landed just a little short of its own mythology. | © Double Fine Productions
Built as a parkour-focused multiplayer shooter, Brink drops players onto a flooded man-made island where Resistance fighters and security forces battle for control. The big selling point ends up draining the game of tension, making movement feel effortless to the point that combat barely requires skill or intention. What’s left is a bundle of half-finished ideas and wasted potential, a game that clearly wanted to be something bigger but never figured out how to get there. | © Splash Damage
Causing absolute chaos as a goose in a quiet village is the entire point of Untitled Goose Game, and it commits to that bit without hesitation. Progress comes from sneaking around, solving light puzzles, and following a bizarre to-do list that mostly involves stealing objects and humiliating unsuspecting humans. None of it really explains why the goose is doing any of this, where the list came from, or why there’s suddenly a second goose, and the game is much happier when those questions are ignored. | © House House
Years in development hell turned Too Human into a high-concept oddity that never quite knew what it wanted to be. The idea of Norse gods as cybernetically enhanced humans, complete with Odin reimagined as a sentient computer network, sounds wild on paper but loses steam once the cuts, missing co-op, and clunky design choices pile up. By the time it finally arrived in 2008, the game felt less like a bold sci-fi myth and more like a relic that made sense only in an earlier console generation. | © Silicon Knights
Returnal plays like a living riddle, following a space explorer stranded on Atropos, a planet where time loops endlessly, and death is just a reset button. Every run throws the player back into the cycle, facing new horrors while piecing together a story told through fragments, logs, and half-answers that never arrive in a straight line. The confusion is deliberate, mirroring the protagonist’s fractured state of mind and turning narrative frustration into part of the experience itself. | © Sony Interactive Entertainment
Rebuilding the entire universe by rolling random junk into massive balls is the core idea of Katamari Damacy, and no further explanation is really offered. The reason everything is gone in the first place is that the King of All Cosmos accidentally destroyed the stars with an overpowered tennis serve, which somehow feels perfectly acceptable here. It’s absurd, playful, and strangely poetic, turning total nonsense into one of the most joyful experiences gaming has ever produced. | © Namco
A world where bugs and snacks are the same thing is the basic setup of Bugsnax, and that alone already feels like a dare. The story follows a journalist heading to Snaktooth Island to investigate bizarre half-bug, half-snack creatures and the disappearance of an explorer, with puns and nonsense baked into every corner. Nothing fully adds up from start to finish, which is exactly the point, and the cute visuals quietly hide some surprisingly dark turns along the way. | © Young Horses
Collecting umbilical cords and eating them to ascend into a higher-dimensional being is a core plot point in Bloodborne, and that alone sets the tone. Like all Soulsborne games, the story hides behind item descriptions, environmental hints, and vague symbolism that invite endless theories but rarely clear answers. Even the developers have admitted they don’t fully grasp the entire plot, which makes struggling to understand it feel less like a failure and more like the intended experience. | © FromSoftware
Being a simple slice of bread on a quest to become toast is the entire premise of I Am Bread, and it somehow gets weirder from there. Turning into toast requires wall-climbing, physics-based parkour, and an absurdly difficult control scheme, all in pursuit of a toaster, a stove, or even a hairdryer if desperation kicks in. As if that weren’t enough, the chaos slowly drives the homeowner insane, proving that this isn’t just about breakfast, it’s about psychological damage caused by bread. | © Bossa Games
Watching Elsa sing Let It Go on the way to stopping a universe-ending villain is just another normal day in Kingdom Hearts III. The game piles Disney worlds, Final Fantasy characters, and original lore into a story that’s emotionally sincere and narratively unhinged at the same time. One minute you’re exploring Andy’s room or dancing through Tangled, the next you’re knee-deep in cosmic destiny and quietly accepting that a two-hour explainer video might be required. | © Square Enix
Any random clip from Death Stranding 2: On the Beach looks completely unhinged without context, which is very much the point. Kojima loves dropping whales from the sky, cryptic monologues, and imagery that feels borderline absurd until you slowly realize it’s all tied to themes of death, limbo, and real-world phenomena like actual whale strandings. By the time everything clicks, it makes so much sense that you briefly wonder if the game explained it or if it just rewired your brain instead. | © Kojima Productions
Some video games try to explain their worlds. These do the opposite. From stories that unravel the moment you think about them to mechanics that feel like a shared fever dream, these games proudly make no sense, and that’s exactly why they’re unforgettable.
