Games with weird, fascinating atmosphere that you can't fully explain

Games with weird, fascinating atmosphere that you can't fully explain

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I've completely missed the whole poseidon plant subplot while playing the first three times.

Halo Combat Evolved

Sonic Adventure

muh atmosphere: the game

>*Muffled Anuu! in the distance*

Daraku Tenshin or "The Fallen Angels" has an atmosphere I've never seen a fighting game take on before and while the apocalyptic feel and brutalist moves are cool it falls into a weird game that's just okay. It also creeps me out quite a bit.

fuck off weeb, nobody asked you

This game was awesome. My favourite RPG.

And then 3 and 4 happened. Shit games.

Fallout 2 has awesome atmosphere but it is nothing compared to Thief 1 & 2. Examples:

youtube.com/watch?v=RpF-d5oCqzA

youtube.com/watch?v=qoHZ0sgRP8Q

youtube.com/watch?v=FIPh9Bv9Mew

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I know it gets posted all the time to the point it's an overrated meme, but pic related. I really did love the world of Termina and wished I could have seen more towns or just more of it in general.

>was
is

Dunno if "weird" was the main feel you were looking for, but there are so many games with great, eerie atmosphere

Planescape Torment
Soul Reaver
La-Mulana
Dark Souls
Bioshock
Another World
Flashback
Aquaria
The Banner Saga
Bastion
Transistor
Darkest Dungeon
EYE
Furi
Inside
LIMBO
LISA
Paper Sorcerer
Pathologic
Psychonauts
Rain World
The Talos Principle

Then there are plenty with not eerie but very immersive, like Might & Magic VI or Legend of Grimrock

FFVIII is a surreal experience even by FF standards. The level of technology/civilization varies dramatically from area to area, the monster designs are unique, and the plot is wacky and ambiguous. Game has a ton of problems but atmosphere is not one of them

C O M F Y
O
M
F
Y

Damn I love this game. The first time I played it, my dog ended up injured and I didn't notice it, so I had to scour through the previous three area's looking for him and healing him. Good times.

>"I'm a 17 year old but I'm going to throw in Planescape Torment to try and get some autism cred"

Nice try, back2reddit4u.

Pic related, but you autists get upset over people liking things so it's too taboo a subject to talk about normally.

I only did two runs of it cause it's short as hell and I thought it was fun, but I don't see why so many people got obsessive over it. I guess fnaf got old and they needed something new.

if only this game was ported, and now the only way to play is that 10 fps garbage

>blackhawk silhuette
God I hope the artist gets jumped by storks.

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I can explain every 'weird' atmosphere in vidya

mah negro
that sidequest alone is better than anything in witcher 3

Nuclear war-torn desert Mad Max style + Art Deco with some scifi stuff to top it off

The whole climate of Half-Life 2 had a similar appeal

The rocky hills, rusty scattered remains of cars and human-made stuff in the very quiet wasteland

When you're not in a frantic shootout it always hits you in that game that down to the ambient sound of the wind blowing the atmosphere is just right

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this, pathologic and the void

I love decayed/decaying desolate urban environments for some reason

Condemned
Painkiller
The Darkness
Max Payne 2 to an extent
Marc Ecko's Getting Up
FEAR
Metro 2033

Listed in order as I thought of them

I know exactly what you mean OP. The first thing that comes to my mind are From Software's old King's Field games, they're ugly as sin and clunky to boot but there's something about their overall feeling that I love a lot. And I played them for the first time like two years ago, so it's not even nostalgia.

It's some combination of the desolate feeling and the soundtrack I think.

youtube.com/watch?v=MDapXvnjAhI

zombies ruin thief for me very, very much.

You can always explain it and it usually boils down to art direction. For example, first Witcher had zounds of more atmosphere compared to 2 and 3, primarily due to how (unintentionally probably) gaunt Geralt looks, and how the world isn't as lush (a product of studio gaining vastly more resources to play with) and how everything is far more scarce and rough around the edges. That being said all three games are pretty shit. Nothing ruins atmosphere as much as turning on detective mode.

DROD

KF is a great example, I'd say it's a combination of music, tempo (of movement) and perspective - you might as well be a floating weapon. It's like a sluggish nightmare at times.

Act 5 when

perspective, unusual UI, good soundtrack, rain and the fact that you can pick up most of the stuff laying around and most of it serves no purpose go towards a general sense of aimlessness early in the game.

But PS:T had great atmosphere.

that's a comfy fort you have. what tileset are you using?

Detective mode was only in 3 though. I mean, it technically was in 2 as well but it wasn't really used in quests.

What is wrong with you?

It's not Dwarf Fortress.

I could say something like Bloodborne or Digital Devil Saga or Ace Combat 04 but I know exactly why those games feel the way they do.

As for those I can't fully explain, this game is genuinely uncomfortable sometimes. Despite everything the game tried to tell me otherwise, with all its cute dialogue and affection meters and bright artwork, there was a bizarre feeling that the returning party members from X1 do not care about the protagonist at all and see him almost as a sidequest NPC. One more story to gloss over and add to the pile. It's so hard to pin down what made me feel this way that I can't decide if the atmosphere was even intentional or if it was just incompetence in creating party dynamics.

I know, it's Deadly Rooms of Death, but I saw an opportunity and went for it. You must admit, zoomed out like that it does somewhat resemble dorf fort.

Its conclusion is missing anyway unless you are playing the restoration mod.

Is it good? Looks fantastic.

>when the game goes balls-deep into the weird concepts and foreign babble right at the start before you even start playing and you can't figure out what the fuck's going on or what people are talking about

EYE is the last one to do this to me. God that game just throws you right in with no remorse.

Yep, it does.

Try Vangers.

eve is the definition of trying too hard + imagery was lifted from gits and wh40k

Pathologic
The Void
Captain Blood

Cryostasis.

Don't expect a typical point-n-click with puzzles and shit, it's mostly reading dialogue and exploring the map/areas to find weird secrets. I love it though, the soundtrack + visuals are great and the story's in just the right place between mundane and fantastic.

LEXX in videogame form. The early to mid 90's were such a good time for weird, psychedelic Dark Sci Fi.

I love how hopeless the world is. The perpetual throes of death suit Santuary well.

If you like some good brain raping Sci Fi horror anons, this right here is a must read

One of the most overrated videogame franchises ever. Yeah, it's atmospheric but the gameplay itself is dull as fuck, there's no sense of any consequence to what you do at any given moment.

I didn't like it to be honest my dude. It was just Lovercraft in Space with Morrison's autistic knowledge of occult trivia as lore. It's too dense without actually being deep.

At times i thought that maybe it was a sort of self-parody, but then it wasn't.

He has much, much better things that this. There are issues of Doom Patrol more scary and mind-bending than Nameless.

Medal of Honor: Allied Assault

i wonder why i never put much effort into disciples compared to homm 2 and 3

which one should i get and any essential mods?

Path of Exile. I just fucking love the atmosphere for that game. Especially Act 1 and 3. Its just so mysterious.

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Came here to post STALKER. Good taste user.

Also excellent.

C H I M

Agree, I don't know why Sup Forums masturbates over this meme game so much. Anomalies were underwhelming, the monsters (which are the only good part of the game) are few and far between. Most of the game is just a generic shooter

are there any games with huge areas like the temple hub area in EYE?

i'm not great at explaining but not like some outdoors open world game with big mountains and shit in the distance. kinda like something that makes you feel really small

Quadrilateral Cowboy is such an amazing hommage to cyberpunk as a genre, to digital heists, telnet and other sorts of bulky pre-Internet 2.0 interfaces, it is trying too hard at times but it stems mostly from it being so well done it has no rough edges.

Well I'm a huge sucker for occult myself, so for me it only made things better, but I can see that it could get a bit tiresome for people not familiar with this sort of things. Still, some of my friends with almost no knowledge in this field loved it just the same. And Lovecraft in space is a rather shallow way to describe it really, it has lovecraftian elements but also has much more going on to it. Morrison said he wanted it to be a bit more like music than normal narrative, that you feel the meaning long before you actually analyse the thing and understand it and I think he managed to do that fairly well which is one of the greatest things about it for me.

It's 1999, it's all dark, you hear weird sounds and noises of animals and monsters, you can't see past a few meters, you constantly look around you because you know the zone is full of roaming monsters that could kill you. If you die you'll leave you corpse and everything on it behind and will respawn in a city far away, naked. But you keep going... because the thrill of exploration keep pushing you, because you want to know what's ahead of you. Excited and terrified at the same time.

I'm not sure, but try G-String.

Blood Money is the definitive "weird atmosphere" game for me, mostly because of the music.

youtube.com/watch?v=HfizjEUYDBI

Dishonored. Intentional or not, I like it.

Stalker games are the king of atmosphere, especially with mods.

Close second comes VtM: Bloodlines, I just love the more gothic version of real life LA.

After that, Underrail really hit the sweet spot for me, and I really can't explain why. It's the first game where caves weren't boring to me.

One more that springs to mind is Pathologic, if you enjoy depressing shit and can find beauty in feeling sad and hopeless, that game is what you were looking for all this time.

PoE has great atmosphere and lore. I just wish I actually liked the grindan and tradan game behind it.

I still listen to some of the soundtrack from time to time. Really nice.

Notice how most of atmospheric games got that way by accident, that is limited resources developers had to play with? That's why art style came up so well, for example you have the original Pathologic with its godawful draw distance and fog walls everywhere but it's much much better than Unity driven Marble Nest which has no rough edges and no decrepit luster the original game has.

It seems very few developers notice this or care. Low poly era is especially worth exploring.

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Try Age of Decadence, it has even more twists and turns than VtMB and it does wonders with its janky engine in terms of art direction with very limited means.

Also Serpent in the Staglands evokes Darklands at the very beginning. Battle Brothers also seems to have that cold plains, bare world atmosphere I covet sometimes. Like a Glen Cook novel for a brief moment.

100% agreed. The only Zelda games I've played are OoT and Majora's Mask, but MM has one of my favorite atmospheres of any game.

combat system bored me fast

Space Funeral, on the other hand...

>Space Funeral
badass

youtube.com/watch?v=TTbm7fM5PY0

activeworlds?

>Age of Decadence
I have a pretty old PC, last time I bought new upgrades was in 2009, but it was top of the line shit back then. How optimized is that game?

how's darwinia as a game?

should run it i believe, not worse optimized than underrail

It's like 10 or more years in the making, so your PC will handle it.

I liked the games but I honestly would love a remake with more fluid gameplay and better feeling overall. There's a lot of things other games have gotten better than stalker in terms of gameplay. I just don't want it to be an early access survival game.

Can you imagine a game with graphics like Call of the Wild, solid FPS gameplay and STALKER atmosphere, story, worldbuilding and monsters?
I'd buy that three times over.

came here to post underrail

great fucking game

expansion "soon"

Once u mod it enough its more challenging and enjoyable then all openworld fps iv seen. vanilla game isnt spectacular tho

>"I'm 17 and I heard this planetescape tournament game is pretty old so it must be some kid trying to act cool
>"Look at him naming those indie trash games I've never heard of, wtf is a "flashback" or an "another world" lmao"

>I'm shilling so I will just name popular atmospheric game including latest Rain world so you buy it
Fuck off.

youtube.com/watch?v=KKtPUcmu9kI&index=13&list=RDmE2f34cgFDo

I miss real mmorpgs.

youtube.com/watch?v=6hdhyfNsZRo
It's decent, i think.

This masterpiece literally nobody played.

>Also
Heart of Darkness
Messiah

Secret of Evermore was good at cultivating an atmosphere like that, most areas in the game had a weird, haunting feel to them, helped a lot by Jeremy Soule's soundtrack.

halo 1 was more mystifying then halo 2 or 3. I remember in halo 2 I was basically just running and gunning. Halo 3 was really good too though.

>MM6
>immersive

what

>OP asks for atmospheric games and he names atmospheric games, lol shill
>Especially that one, it's recent so it doesn't count

I played it long time ago, but I remember fondly Syberia 1 and 2. Surprisingly Syberia 3 will be released in few weeks

Holy shit, I used to play this all the time in my high school days.

>MM6
>not immersive
what

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