As much as games should nail a compelling story and fun and satisfying mechanics, art direction is also one of the most defining elements. And perhaps one of the most underrated and more niche art styles seen in games is the psychedelic aesthetic, purposely designed in a way to mimic the hallucinatory effects and colors of a trippy psychedelic drug experience.
The use of a psychedelic style in game design is very versatile, as you’ll see it utilized in a variety of genres from unique RPGs to Metroidvanias, shooters, and rhythm and music-based games. If you seek to be astounded by bright-colored landscapes and trippy environments that overload the senses, these psychedelic games achieve it best.
Ultros is a psychedelic Metroidvania that’s from the publisher of Clair Obscur,Kepler Interactive. This game takes you to an interstellar location known as The Sarcophagus, or what’s described as a “cosmic uterus,” and there’s also a black hole involved in the narrative that puts you through a time loop where you lose your abilities, evoking a sort of roguelike element.
Seeing a Metroidvania done in this art style and atmosphere is refreshing and bold. The environment design and color choices are allwonderfully Lovecraftianand psychedelic, and there are many mysteries within The Sarcophagus to explore, including the titular creature Ultros that’s being held there.
Psychedelic ’90s Doom made in 2020 is the kind of retro aesthetic thatboomer shooterPost Void brings. It’s a fast-paced experience involving trippy environments and gory animations. The lighting, music, and sound design also add to the intense and well-crafted levels, which are procedurally generated.
Post Void gives you various weapons like a shotgun, Uzi, pistol, and knife to mow down enemies at lightning speed. The pixel graphics, animations, and art direction are perfect for a psychedelic shooter design, and you have the unique health bar system taking the form of an idol you hold in your hands, filling up as you kill enemies.
You’ve probably played sniper games before, like the Sniper Elite and Hitman series, but you’ve never seen sucha unique one as what Children of the Sun has in store. There’s limited movement, and the gameplay is set in stages, where the protagonist must find the best vantage point to start killing off their targets, as the bullet will only travel POV-style from one target’s position to the next.
Children of the Sun is like Sniper Elite with a psychedelic coat of paint and graphics and visuals reminiscent of Lorelei and the Laser Eyes and Anger Foot. The mechanics of sniping serving more as a strategic puzzle is brilliant, and the world and revenge story surrounding the titular cult are quite trippy, but do you expect any less froma Devolver Digital title?
In Thumper, you are a space beetle ina rhythm game-driven psychedelic odyssey on a seemingly never-ending track that plays out a bit like the light cycle scenes from Tron. The colors and visuals are pretty mind-blowing, and the music and sound effects are very cool with how they go with the flow of the track as well as the animations of the Silver Surfer-esque beetle protagonist.
Throughout Thumper, there will be bosses you have to take on through the rhythm mechanics, and the fights are simply mesmerizing. Even more psychedelic is the main enemy in the game, a giant metal head with spikes.
Take a nostalgic trip back to the ’90s with Hypnospace Outlaw, an internet simulator game that’s set in an alternate version of 1999, just before the feared technological disaster of Y2K. In this game, you’ll patrol the digital space as an Enforcer for the Hypnospace Patrol Department, tasked with rooting out the outlaws in cyberspace who are harming other internet users or causing viruses.
Just imagine that one effortless minigame from GTA 5 where Michael had to clear viruses and all sorts of lewd ads from the internet, and creating a more complex game out of it with trippy pixel art and psychedelic landscapes and UI that calls back to the ’90s.
Everhood is a very interesting game, mechanics and aesthetics-wise. It’s an RPG adventure with rhythm-based music battles and features a colorful, psychedelic pixel art style with a world design reminiscent ofRPG Maker games. The protagonist is also a wooden doll trying to recover a missing arm, and the overall gameplay and UI are simplistic yet still unlike anything in the genre.
In 2025, the developers of Everhood launched a sequel, which carries over the same aesthetics but also updates the design in significant ways. There’s a new protagonist, the adventure is now much longer, there are plenty of new enemies, songs, and locations, and the mind-warping psychedelic visuals are even more refined.
A JRPG-inspired psychedelic game by a solo developer via RPGMaker is what the indie hidden gem Hylics series entails. The landscapes, characters, and enemies are as weird, abstract, and psychedelic as possible, and the turn-based combat encounters are just as mind-boggling and unconventional, leaving a very original and creative mark.
The overall aesthetic of Hylics feels like Fantastic Planet crossed with Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and it is quite the visual overload, though an oddly satisfying one. Five years after the launch of the first game, developer Mason Lindroth made a sequel, which follows the same art direction and party-based combat mechanics, but also introduces an airship, a 3D world and character design,and stop-motion.
One of the most star-studded indie gamesthat has a cast made up of names like Lena Headey, Mark Strong, Jason Schwartzman, and the late Carl Weathers, The Artful Escape is a musical psychedelic odyssey with platforming mechanics, and features all sorts of vibrant landscapes and alien creatures you’ll encounter in the Cosmic Extraordinary.
The main protagonist of The Artful Escape isteen musician Francis Vendetti, who wants to reinvent himself as an artist and break out from the shadow of the late musical legend who was his uncle, Johnson Vendetti. The story blends poignant writing, an original premise, psychedelic sci-fi and fantasy, and folk music, and it’s especially great if you also enjoyedthe genre-bending filmSinners.
Now better-known forthe universally acclaimed horror remakeof Silent Hill 2, Bloober Team’s Layers of Fear was one of the earliest horror masterpieces you could say the studio achieved. It’s a first-person walking simulator-style horror game with an incredibly eerie atmosphere and some of the most masterful set pieces and jump scares that can get you like any well-made horror film.
Where the psychedelic part comes in is the mind-bending, haunting, and surreal changes in the environment, marked by splattered paint dripping and pooling from different directions. Layers of Fear’s story indeed revolves around a troubled painter with a dark past, consumed by guilt over his marriage that ended in tragedy and driven mad by his art.
One of the earliest games to really embrace the wild and unique psychedelic and pixel art aesthetic was Hotline Miami in 2012, a game so influential that it even hadan Easter egg homage in The Last of Us Part 2. It’s a top-down, surprisingly gory and violent shooter with a beloved soundtrack set in 1980s Miami, seeing you as a vengeful figure ordered via an answering machine to kill members of the criminal world.
Hotline Miami 2, cleverly titled Wrong Number, continues the top-down story of violence and psychedelic themes from the original game. The most interesting aspect of the sequel is its use ofa non-linear narrativethat switches between different timelines, like you’d typically see in movies. Both games were also published by Devolver Digital.
