Games that feel genuinely cursed?

[BasilABST]

Hey hey so recently I've been diving deeper and deeper into more psychological horror stuff. I was always a big fan of Silent Hill and the likes, but I'm not talking about that. Lately I've come across a game(??) called Museum of Anything Goes, and after playing it I was left with a feeling that this game was genuinely cursed. To summarize the game and why I feel this way:

The game is set within a museum where you can click on pictures to go through them Mario 64 style. It's a point and click from the 90's that uses a lot of FMVs, already leading it to have a weird feel... but the sound design and sheer unintentional creepiness makes all of it just look so wrong. Not to mention that the game has several sections that include some genuinely unsettling stuff like one painting that takes you down an unhinged ramble about the entropy of existence with a small section of it being in a Wingdings-like font I really should work to decode, or another one that has the developer filming random people in the street. Lots of really weird, creepy, no good stuff.
 
But after I completed the game and saw the credits, I was left with such a genuinely indescribable feeling. It really felt like I played something I really was not meant to play, but how everything lined up for me to be there at that moment for a long time now. Like I was experiencing something meant for someone else. And that made me have this craving for more, in a way. Maybe less real life creepy, but still.
(The fact I am looking for a pretty similar game from my childhood probably helped me feel the way I did, honestly. It's a weird melancholic vibe!)


I really like Shipwrecked 64 for this exact reason as well, if you're familiar with it. MyHouse.WAD is also a great example, alongside most of ENIGMA STUDIO's games. And I came here to ask you all:

Do you have any games that gave you this feeling? Would you recommend them?

[HisVirusness]

Almost any Newgrounds game pre-2002.  And I mean the stuff like Pico's School.  The game legit freaked me out way back when.  I took a look at it a couple of years ago, and it made me feel very uneasy, and that's outside of the subject matter.  Like, MyHouse.wad was meant to be cursed; that's what its central design goal was.  Early NG wasn't coming from a place that had an established design language, yet had a competent quality to their extremely intense media that came off as... uncanny, outside of it being shocking.

[BasilABST]

Like, MyHouse.wad was meant to be cursed; that's what its central design goal was.  Early NG wasn't coming from a place that had an established design language, yet had a competent quality to their extremely intense media that came off as... uncanny, outside of it being shocking.

That's a pretty great point there, and it's what I was trying to say with Museum of Anything Goes. I'm not sure the game was made to be scary, all of its marketing and general presentation feel sincere enough that I just think it's someone not realizing how creepy they were being. But the issue is that I don't think there are many things like it outside of what you mentioned.

The reason I mentioned MyHouse and Shipwrecked is because they are trying to intentionally make you feel as if they are unintentionally scary. Which is a bit of a confusing sentence, but I think it's a really nice genre of horror, and one that I think can give more nice recommendations for what to check out. If this makes any sense.

[Waap.]

Game that is designed to feel cursed is Happy! the Hippo. You can download on Steam a free demo, styled like it is on a demo disc. 3D platformer collectathon that is fun but creepy. I can't tell if the free demo is the full intended game or if more is being made.

One game that is clear inspiration for Happy! the Hippo is fourth Spyro game Spyro: Enter the Dragonfly. It went through development problems and crunch and the game does not feel finished. Bad lag slow movement weird empty levels many glitches. Music mostly good but final boss is terrible. Scary glitch on Honey Slide if you face the wrong way talking to NPC at the end, Spyro's head goes backwards.

I have from my childhood a pair of cheap pc games collections called 101 Kid's Brainy Games and 50 Blockbuster Games Volume 1. They have some games on them that felt cursed and scary.
On Brainy Games:
Sunken Treasure is a puzzle game with pirates theme and pirate facts, including, when you lose the game, a fact about pirate execution paired with a black and white photomanipulation to illustrate it. It scared me as a kid so I couldn't play it. The Ezone puzzle games have creepy cartoon characters and loud obnoxious music that interrupts itself or glitches often, creating strange creepy vibe.

On Blockbuster Games there is Treasure Mole, which is a Dig Dug clone with slightly unsettling graphics because they feel a bit too 3D, a trait many games in the collections share. Also when you die there is picture of a slightly too realistic skull and "The mole is dead. Try again in the next life", and some boulders in levels are the creepy skulls instead of rocks. The main menu image is nice scene of the mole on a hill with a big moon in the background, but on game over you see variant of this with a grave marker on the hill instead and the moon and sky is red and there is a skull in the moon. The music is sweet pleasant but feels sinister from the visuals.

[MrsMoe]

When I was a kid, I had a CD-ROM copy of Reader Rabbit Toddler. Most of it was pretty tame, with a lot of standard run-of-the-mill preschool minigames like sorting and making music, but there's this one game that's really.....off.

...Idk if it's the rabbit's constant unbreaking staring into your soul or his weirdly CGI motion-captured body that feels detatched from his head, but it gives me the fucking heebie jeebies as an adult.

I love The Museum of Anything Goes btw~