One exercise that’s helped me understand weird games better has been figuring out what exactly makes them weird. Many times, a weird game is actually just a normal game that looks and sounds strange.

The truly weird games have been the ones that operate by their own logic, games governed by rules and systems that don’t jive with the ones we’re accustomed to. My favorite example of this, as always, is Knights of the Crystallion, a “cultural simulation” game that asks you to follow the arcane spiritual practices of a dead civilization in order to make progress. There’s a big difference between the games that simply look unusual and the games that push you to think outside your normal mindset.

Somewhere between those two ideas of weird is the The Tone Rebellion. It’s a strategy game about expanding your empire over vast galactic territory, a genre that was on its way to the point of oversaturation when The Tone Rebellion came out in 1997. But digging past the surface-level clichés, The Tone Rebellion is trying for something grander, steeped in myths and history and alien astrology: a network of symbols and values that begs you to acknowledge them before you can progress.

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