Best Indie Games With A Weird Central Mechanic

Indie games may not have the production values of their big-budget brothers, but they make up for that with unbridled inventiveness in their mechanics that make them stand out from the crowd like no other games can.

Whether it be using a sledgehammer as the only form of movement or paper reviewing and proofreading, there are plenty of indie games with truly strange central mechanics.

6 Getting Over It

Sisyphus Never Had It So Hard

As the designer of the legendarily frustrating and hilarious game QWOP where players had to control the individual limbs of a runner in a catastrophic way, it’s no surprise that Foddy’s other great experiment in absurdist humor has a similarly bizarre central premise.

In Getting Over It, gamers play as a… naked dude in a cauldron wielding a sledgehammer. Using the sledgehammer to propel themselves along some truly wild puzzles that would test the Dalai Lama’s patience because of how rage-inducing they are, players must make their way to the end of a brutal gauntlet all while listening to philosophy of resilience. It’s strange, doesn’t always work, but is incredibly rewarding once the finish line is finally reached.

5 Baba Is You

Change The Rules

Puzzle games are hard to truly innovate on because they are one of the oldest kinds of games ever made, far predating video games. That means if an indie creator wants to stand out in the puzzle space, they need to do something truly strange.

Enter Baba Is You. In Baba Is You, players come face to face with their assumption that the ruleset of a puzzle is fixed, and instead have to construct their own rules through modular construction to solve puzzles. It sounds wild and weird – because it is – but it’s an inventive way of reinventing the puzzle genre that requires genius-level solutions to complete.

4 Untitled Goose Game

Honking Hell

Back when it was released in 2019, Untitled Goose Game became an internet darling because of its strange and delightful premise of simply being a goose trying to cause as much mayhem as possible. But there’s more to it than just internet fodder.

The premise is weird, but having the mechanics of the game geared toward just causing mischief is truly strange and relatively unheard of in the video game world, where mechanics are usually directed toward (generally) violence. Pure mischief alone is a fun and strange way to reinterpret the boundaries of play and is a great gateway drug to the world of silly and strange indie games.

3 Doki Doki Literature Club

A Visual Novel You Better Not Read

Visual novel games are not for everyone, because they involve a lot of reading and some may even debate whether they qualify as a “game” because choices can sometimes be limited. However, Doki Doki Literature Club showed just how powerful the visual novel game is and brought it to a whole new audience.

While the actual mechanics of visual novels aren’t strange in the game, the way Team Salvato used it certainly was, carefully setting up expectations of how visual novel games function and the player’s role, then subverting those mechanics in some of the most effective and dark twists modern gaming has to offer.

2 Pony Island

Something Rotten Beneath The Surface

These days, Daniel Mullins has become a legend in the indie game community for his mind-bending games that constantly subvert expectations and interrogate the nature of video games themselves, and Pony Island is certainly the game that put him on the map, setting him up for the monstrous success of Inscryption.

Pony Island starts innocuously enough as a strange arcade cabinet simulator, however, it becomes clear that the player has to change the game’s code to bypass obstacles and progress further, unlocking malicious and effectively unnerving narrative twists that go as far as actually messing with the player’s device.

1 Papers Please

Stamp Of Approval

Though there’s nothing wrong with games that offer an escape from reality, there’s a reason why games like Papers, Please have been cited as showing the sincere power of play as a method of empathy and understanding, using truly strange and unprecedented mechanics to make the player reflect on their own actions.

In Papers, Please, players take control of a border control agent tasked with assessing the documents of would-be immigrants against a thick rulebook of parameters. It’s easy to imagine that checking documents is far too weird a mechanic to work, but it’s not only mechanically engaging, but it forces the player into compelling moral quandaries and events progress that shows just why mechanical innovation can breed great video game stories.