I may not look like it, but I’m actually very interested in video games. Perhaps not so much playing them or writing about them, because I don’t really play games much anymore. My brother was always the gamer in the family. He laid claim to the Super Nintendo when we were children and PlayStations 1 and 2 as teens. I was relegated to the default role of Player 2 if I was allowed to touch the controller at all.

On some occasions, I had the coveted role of “shotgun,” or the one who read the cheat manual or walkthrough. I would sit cross-legged with heavy binders of walkthroughs and cheats printed off the internet and bound in massive tomes. My brother would play because he was good at running, fighting, and shooting. I would read the story of the walkthrough and tell him what to expect. Puzzles, traps, shortcuts—I had all the knowledge. In exchange, I would watch him play and experience the story that way, like watching a film where I got to shout out the answers to puzzles and tell the protagonist what to do.

My personal affair with gaming came to an end several console generations ago, at the height of the PlayStation 2 era. Back then, I used to buy strange bargain bin games from places like Blockbuster and Toys R Us and play them without any idea what I was getting into. I also got the cast-off games my brother didn’t want, because they were too weird or didn’t have enough violence. This was how I got into game series like Katamari Damacy, Galerians, and Bust-A-Groove. I also used to play games like Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, and Silent Hill 4: The Room obsessively and to completion, exploring every nook and cranny of those games for days at a time.

Now, having lost my taste for realism, graphic fidelity, and nausea-inducing game engines, my gaming days are well and truly behind me. But the capabilities of video games as a storytelling vehicle still fascinates me.  Video games can accomplish things that other mediums can’t due to the inherent limitations of text, images, film, and music on their own. Even if I don’t play them terribly often, I’m always keen to understand how they work and convey their messages.

This month, I wanted to talk about three games that I’ve enjoyed a great deal recently. These are games that don’t exist. You can’t play them because they were never created—at least, not in the traditional sense. But you can still experience these games and their very different styles, aesthetics, and approaches to their themes. And, most importantly, you don’t have to play them to experience them, because the creators have found ways around that.

Note that while all these games fit somewhere under the umbrella of “horror,” they’re not gory, scary, or even really violent. They do deal with some weighty themes—identity, death, grief, trauma, memory, cancer, and mental illness—and can be quite tense to watch. The first game, Diminish, contains some disturbing imagery in the 14th installment (for which there is a content warning in the description) that I do think is justified by the logic of the story as presented. You’re free to opt-in or out of these stories as you see fit. Consider this but a humble recommendation from someone who enjoys games for all the strange, uneasy, and cathartic stories they have the power to tell.

So, please join me on this little excursion into the world of games that don’t exist and enjoy some games the same way I do—through levels of abstraction and dislocation, and sometimes simply looking over someone else’s shoulder.

Let’s begin.

#1: Diminish

Diminish is a game about dying, made by the dead for those left behind. It presents itself in the form of a let’s play video series as the narrator trudges through a grim, seemingly impossible game designed solely for him. The series takes a page from the highly revered (and frequently imitated) Petscop, translating its lessons into a concise, episodic narrative about grief. It’s a frustrating, heartbreaking, and beautifully human storytelling experience, as the narrator slowly unpacks his personal history and the complex nature of sibling relationships.

The love between siblings can be at times wonderful, terrible, and hard to put into words. It’s a love that is often complicated by the actions of parents and other adult authorities and bears the weight of consequences adults don’t understand until it’s too late. In the case of Diminish, family bonds are atomized and recontextualized by a terminal illness that I have rarely seen given voice to in such raw and vulnerable ways.

While Diminish is the most straightforward and emotionally satisfying of the games I will be discussing, it may still pose a barrier to entry for some. It uses the trappings of the let’s play format—a faceless narrator speaking over game footage, providing comments and reactions—and the genre of rage games—ludicrously difficult games designed to provoke anger from the player—to convey its themes and story. I would argue that the endless grinding is narratively effective in conveying the frustrating treadmill of grief and unprocessed trauma. You feel the weight of every mistake that sends the narrator back to the beginning of the level. He processes the events of the game aloud, chewing on its messages and the meaning encoded within, shifting between perseverance and despair with every painful but ultimately cathartic step toward the conclusion.

If you don’t mind someone shouting in frustration as they grind through the same level over and over, you may find Diminish a rewarding experience.

#2: Illusion Lock

Illusion Lock is a game about an island that you can never leave. The inhabitants must burn their boats upon arrival to secure their homes there on peaceful shores. Tree people all, who left the comforts of civilization for the shelter of the island and the Tooth Home. The Tooth Home provides, so long as you feed it the teeth it craves. Illusion Lock is a place filled with monsters where nothing is quite what it seems, as the game’s sole developer begins to slowly lose control of his creation.

The game presents itself in a series of developer videos as the narrator, the creator, explains his unfinished project. Each stage gives you more insight into the development process, even as holes begin to appear in the narrator’s story. He isn’t being truthful, but it’s impossible to know what he’s lying about—or if he even knows what he’s lying about and why.

The series has a unique, outsider art aesthetic. From its child-like settings and character designs to its eclectic score, the game as presented reads as an authentic, unpolished game from an amateur designer. It commits to its style in a way that feels refreshing in this space, as nothing else is as bright, juvenile, and surreally charming as Illusion Lock. What begins as a slow burn “ghost in the machine” set-up devolves into a truly strange yet fascinating experience. It’s as if a cheap knock-off edutainment game from the 1990s began to break down, becoming further disconnected from logical reality until it ceases to be a game at all.

And what it becomes is hard to say. What do you do with something that lives beyond the will of its creator? What do you do when the machine begins to talk to itself, privileging the characters within the world it contains as if the narrator—and the audience—isn’t even there?

Illusion Lock poses more questions than it cares to answer, but the project is strange, oddly charming, and worth experiencing at least once.

#3: House of Aberdeen

You awake in a house that you know very well, but you innately understand is hostile to you. The house, of course, isn’t a house at all. It’s a school, and its rooms don’t make sense. You maybe remember who you are—your name, your face, that you were born in the bathroom here—and you maybe remember how you got here. There are other people here, though, and you don’t remember them.

But they remember you.

There are monsters outside, in the quiet dark of the Los Angeles suburb you find yourself. The school keeps changing and everyone here is broken and speaks of strange horrors beyond the uncomfortable safety of the house. The timeline keeps changing, too. Every choice you make causes strange effects. Your save file is corrupted like the media becomes corrupted and your choices keep closing your window of opportunity to change the direction of the story. Perhaps it isn’t a game at all.

Perhaps you’re the Threadholder, and perhaps you’re already dead.

House of Aberdeen is a game dredged up from the depths of a dirty, half-remembered nightmare. It’s an uneasy, glitchy, lo-fi chiptune odyssey into a woman’s shifting sense of identity. Imagine a browser-based point-and-click from the early 2000s corroded by battery acid and left to decompose in the dark until someone, or something, opened it up again. Suburban young adult ennui drips from this project in palpable disaffection. The player isn’t who she thinks she is, and it isn’t clear who she’s supposed to be to begin with. Her real identity is revealed as the reality of the timelines—the threads—continue to unravel with each major choice.

And as every choice in the game provides avenues for more information for the player to unpack, the disturbing gravity of the answer moves closer in the dark. Make peace with your monsters because they’re already here.

House of Aberdeen is a dark, nostalgic ride that evokes the familiar sensation of playing strange games in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s. It feels haunted in a very specific way that takes me back to finding those bargain bin games and putting them in the PlayStation with no idea what awaited me. The series feels like being a teen and young adult during those years did, in the suburbs leading into and immediately following 9/11. Family relationships cracked under financial strain. Friendships broke down as people grew apart but stayed involved with each other out of proximity, familiarity, or the fear of being alone. Everyone felt fake and untrustworthy—as fake as the stability of the suburb itself, with its manicured lawns and nice houses, even as the rot destroys the foundations underneath.

All you’re left with is a house that keeps changing, and people you don’t recognize.

This series is something very special. You can find the full project here to experience for yourself as the creator intended. I highly recommend House of Aberdeen to anyone who enjoys weird stories to watch in the dark.

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