Games that make you question the mental stability of the creators.

[Drathnoxis]

Have you ever seen a game that made you think "whoever made this game has serious problems"? Because I have. I just watched SuperGreatFriend play a Japanese PS1 game called Oh No! and all I can think is that it is the product of a very disturbed mind. Please just look at it and tell me I'm wrong. Every character has a booger hanging out of their nose and a massive bulge on their crotch. Near the end of the stream there is a scene involving a towel that I would post, but I think it would get me in trouble with the mods. The only suitable response is "jesus christ..."
This game crosses so many lines. I wish I knew what the dialogue said.

Anyway, what games have you played that have made you think "the person who made this is really messed up."

 

[meiam]

The weird ass stuff doesn't make me worry for their sanity, it's just the usual "throw whatever at the wall and see what stick", like the guy who made Nier started with drakengard which featured giant man eating baby, after a couple of attempt he hit on something that resonated with the public and worked.

I'm more worried about people who worked at souless job, like the Fifa devs must all have a noose in their cubicle and every morning must look at it thinking "Is today the day?".

 

[Specter Von Baren]

I mean... Weird ass games really aren't that weird. These kinds of oddball concepts have been with the medium since the begining, Rayman, Pac-Man, Super Mario Brothers. SMB has things like walking shitake mushrooms, floating blocks that eject mushrooms that make you grow and flowers that give you the ability to throw fireballs, among other things. So this isn't the kind of thing I'd say needs one to question the sanity of the creators.

I will say that I think the Japanese are one step further than other countries in that really weird ass games seem to be their own sub genre for them with things like Katamari and Stretch Panic, but again, being really weird is hardly uncommon in games.

 

[BrawlMan]

People like Grasshopper Studios, Suda51, Way Forward, Itsuno, and Kamiya I don't question. They and their teams are cool people. I question people that always claim to be sane or "real & about human emotions". Screw off David Cage.

 

[Drathnoxis]

I'm more worried about people who worked at souless job, like the Fifa devs must all have a noose in their cubicle and every morning must look at it thinking "Is today the day?".

I wouldn't worry about that. I'm sure they aren't allowed personal effects in company cubicles.

 

[Drathnoxis]

I think I'd also list The Quiet Man. You need to be pretty messed up to cast the same actress as both the main character's love interest, and also his mother. Not to mention all the other questionable design decisions in the game.

 

[PsychedelicDiamond]

There are a bunch of indie games that have that distinct "the person who made this was probably not mentally well." quality to them. Cruelty Squad is one that managed to get surprisingly popular. And is actually not half bad, if you manage to get over the visuals. And the sound. And the writing. The creator actually has a background in art that looks pretty much exactly like the game.

There are way too many RPG Maker games to count that would fit that description. Where They Cremate the Roadkill is the first example that comes to mind, and it's actually semi professionally made. But the deeper you go, the weirder it gets, ranging from artsy like The Endless Empty to properly unhinged like Asylum of Pleasure and Pain. It's an absolute treasure trove of outsider art because of its accessibility.

The most straight forward example is, of course, Drowned God: Conspiracy of the Ages, the backstory of which you'd immediately assume was made up if you heard it. An extremely surreal 90's Myst style point and click adventure game about conspiracy theory lore made by a man named Henry Horse who died under mysterious circumstances, stabbing his terminally ill wife, his pets and himself 40 times. Somehow, this is not the premise of a horror movie, that is the games actual history.

 

[EvilRoy]

Omikron, which is a David Cage game, actually always stuck out to me as a strong indication that dude was a little off. The guts of the game are what I'm gonna call "experimental", with a lot of really iffy basic choices in game design and morally peculiar decisions to foist on the player with very little acknowledgement of those choices in the long run. Plus they landed David Bowie to do music for the game, and the music is very good. I'm not a massive Bowie fan, but it was clearly well made and not phoned in at all. So to get that kind of backing and then drown a game in perplexing choices and poor design is like... concerning. If it was bad because they tried way too hard and just didn't know where to go with it I could understand that, you land serious talent and as a reaction you try too hard and mess up - fairly normal human failure I think. But this was like someone thinking they had landed upon how games were gonna be made for the next hundred years and just coming across as aliens pretending to be human instead.

Also Homefront and Turning Point. I understand most first person shooters semi-reality based are gonna have some weird politics crop up because its hard to have a clean cut good guy/bad guy situation in real life but those ones went way too far. They were a little too into their own over the top stories and it came through in uncomfortable ways. I actually would not want to meet the writers of those games.

 

[BrawlMan]

Also Homefront and Turning Point. I understand most first person shooters semi-reality based are gonna have some weird politics crop up because its hard to have a clean cut good guy/bad guy situation in real life but those ones went way too far. They were a little too into their own over the top stories and it came through in uncomfortable ways. I actually would not want to meet the writers of those games.

At least with Turning Point, you will most likely won't. Spark Unlimted closed their doors in 2015. Their last game was Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z.

​

Homefront had horrible management.

Death March: The long, tortured journey of Homefront

How mismanagement, incompetence and pride killed THQ’s Kaos Studios

www.polygon.com

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

Not that I find it disturbing or anything but Celeste is clearly the work of a depressed person. Depression might be a low fit for "mental instability" but it's a mental illness all the same.

I don't think Suda51 is mentally ill for making Killer7 but the game is a good simulation of it.

Anodyne.

 

[Specter Von Baren]

Demonophobia.

Edit: So to give more context on what I mean without going into too many details. There is a twisted sort of art to making one feel uncomfortable, to make you really feel rattled or touched by something. One of the most common ways to point this out is in the conversation about depictions of violence. In big budget action movies, violence comes off as more... "prettied up" than real that in real life. There's a very well done sense of timing with one particular scene of violence in this game that is twisted and uncomfortable for me with how it is paced and how long it goes on for. 2 years before God of War 3 came out with the scene at the end of punching Zeus in the face that made people feel gross, this game did something similar.