Statistically speaking, there’s a pretty good chance you’ve seen at least one film directed or written by Hollywood mainstay, Tim Burton.
The guy’s been making feature films since the 80s, and many of them are certified bangers.
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Both his live-action works like Beetlejuice and Mars Attacks and his animated films like The Nightmare Before Christmas have a distinctly off-kilter vibe to them, whether in their stories or overall presentation.
Whenever you see a Burton film, you knowyou’re in for something that’s going to make you tilt your head quizzically, followed by a mischievous smile.
Whether intentionally or otherwise, quite a few video games echo the Burton vibe, with deliberately odd-looking characters and strange, mildly grim subject matters.
10Lost In Random
Time To Roll The Dice
Lost in Random
Have you ever takena close look at a board gamebefore? Big-headed character tokens, circumnavigating an oddly-proportioned world governed exclusively by random chance; it may sound silly to think about something so innocuous in such a way, but that kind of story is Burton’s bread and butter. It’s also exactly what you get from Lost in Random.
In Lost in Random, the lands are ruled by a tyrannical queen who submits all of them to the whims of fate with a roll of her enchanted die.
As the owner of the only other dice in the world, our young hero Even needs to roll her way through the six citiesof Random to defeat the queen and bring her kidnapped sister home.
The cities of Random all look like increasingly elaborate board games brought to life.
Starting with Onecroft and its ramshackle, improvised houses made of thimbles and teapots, you move through upside-down towns, war-torn trenches, and more.
9Flipping Death
Friends On The Other Side
Flipping Death
Death and whatever comes after it is a recurring element throughout Burton’s works, with films like Beetlejuice and Corpse Bride being standout examples. It’s not the most pleasant thing to think about, but it is fun to hypothesize about what’s waiting on the other side of the veil.
One game that takes a fun spin on this isFlipping Death, where “the other side” is an apt descriptor.
In Flipping Death,the Otherside literally exists on the flipside of reality, a shadow of the world of the living and its denizens.
After our protagonist Penny gets a temp job from Death following her own sudden demise, she gains the power to flip between these two realms using the souls of the living as a medium. Despite the somewhat morbid subject matter, it’s a very silly game.
Using her powers of possession, Penny can indirectly manipulate peoples’ bodies, including controlling their limbs and reading their innermost thoughts. You’ll have to make some exceptionally dumb stuff happen to clear the way to progression.
8Alice: Madness Returns
Classic Burton Territory
Alice: Madness Returns
Burton directed the 2010 live-action Alice in Wonderland film, which remains one of the most well-known live-action depictions of the story to date.
Having Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter probably helped with that, but it also showed that Burton has a strong understanding of Alice in Wonderland as a story.
For a game with a similarly twisted depiction of the old tale, we haveAlice: Madness Returns.
Alice: Madness Returns is the sequel tothe popular American McGee’s Alice, though you don’t need to play the latter to play the former.
The game takes a much darker look at the existence of Wonderland through Alice’s psyche, with the landscape damaged and demented by the traumatic events and dangerous people she’s encountered.
Alice is no frail little girl, though; with her Vorpal Blade and hammer-like Hobby Horse, she can forcefully purge her mindscape of these intrusive elements and get Wonderland back to a semblance of the beautiful world it’s supposed to be.
7Psychonauts
Psychonauts
Burton’s animated films like Frankenweenie tend to play a little fast and loose with the traditional human silhouette. Why make everyone look the same when you can make them all look like misshapen weirdos?
It creates a fun contrast to seeweird-looking charactersacting relatively normally, and you get a lot of that from the many characters ofPsychonauts.
No two characters in Psychonauts look exactly the same, with some possessing gangly, elongated limbs and others hauling around massive heads with exaggerated features.
None of this is unusual in-universe, mind you, everyone just looks like that. Even our protagonist, Raz, has a bit of an odd silhouette with his tiny feet and sausage fingers.
This helps to create that cool contrast when you enter one of the game’s mental worlds and encounter creatures and characters that somehow manage to be even weirder. Hey, mental health can be a bit of an ugly subject, apparently literally.
6Have A Nice Death
Bureaucracy Is Scarier Than Death
Have a Nice Death
Returning to the subject of life after death, films like Beetlejuice downplay the actual fear of losing one’s life, and instead draw focus to potentially worse things that come after.
In Beetlejuice, it was being stuck in an office waiting room, and inHave a Nice Death, it’s being stuck in the office itself doing paperwork.
In Have a Nice Death, the reaper himself has been clinically overworked since the dawn of time, and decides to make his way through the upper echelons of Death, Inc. to formally request some PTO.
Unfortunately, the entire system of the company is in disarray, with rabid lost souls freely wandering the halls.
Have a Nice Death isa roguelite game, which means you’re going to die a lot and be sent right back to the mountain of paperwork on your desk.
That’s the kind of afterlife depiction you’d definitely see in a Burton film: one that’s been hilariously choked to undeath by inefficient bureaucracy.
5Don’t Starve
Pointy And Scratchy
Don’t Starve
Just about every fantastical film that Burton has had a hand in has several recurring elements, whether they’re animated or live-action.
You can see background elements with scratchy, pencil-like textures and characters with odd, pointed features and clothing. One game that employs both of these design qualities isDon’t Starve.
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Don’t Starve doesn’t give us much in the way of story, at least off the bat.
All you really need to know is that you’re a little sketch person, you’realone and unarmed in a big, dark world, and if you’re not proactive about that second thing, you’re probably going to starve to death. Or worse!Likelyworse!
When you’re not busy not starving, you can appreciate the game’s aesthetic a lot more, from its misshapen trees and biomes to the bulbous, slack-jawed pig people that inexplicably populate the world. Just because it’s not pleasant to live in doesn’t mean it can’t look cool.
4Little Nightmares
Burton Characters To The Extreme
Little Nightmares
Burton doesn’t typically make or direct full-on horror movies. It’s like the residents of Halloween Town say, it’s fun to be spooked, but there’s no need to be mean about it.
Hypothetically, though, what would happen if Burton took his limiters off and went for full fear impact? Well, you’d probably get something likeLittle Nightmares.
Little Nightmares has all the weird proportions and distorted set dressing of a Burton film, but without the little ray of sunshine hidden beneath it.
This is a dangerous and frightening world, one in which our protagonist Six is borderline defenseless against the humanoid abominations that populate it.
One cool trick Little Nightmares uses to highlight its world and character designs is deliberately obscuring them as much as possible.
You can tell these creatures are inhuman at a glance, but they always seem to be hunched over or have their back turned. If you ever have a chance to get a good look, they’re probably already chasing you.
Life In The Shadows
Burton’s always had a skill for manipulating light and shadow in his films, carefully manipulating the presence of colors and darkness to set a scene and convey his desired tone. There’s a lot of potential in a shadow, even the one you cast yourself, and you can see that potential in action inContrast.
Contrast is kind of like watching a vaudeville performance in the 1920s; it’s strange and exaggerated, but still clearly has a story it wants to tell you.
A lot of this story is conveyed through the medium of shadows and silhouettes. Our protagonists Didi and Dawn are the only full people you ever really see, while everyone else is just a shadow illuminated by lamplight.
Contrast also tinkers with light and shadow in a more literal sense, as Dawn has the ability to slip into the 2D shadows around her and manipulate them as though they were tangible objects. By directly controlling the world’s shadows, you make your way forward and illuminate the story.
2Voodoo Vince
That Voodoo You Do
Voodoo Vince
Just about every part of the world has its own little pockets of weirdness and mysticism you may draw from to tell and expand a story.
Burton’s no slouch when it comes to finding weird in the world (or making it), and if he ever made a film set in the back alleys of New Orleans, we imagine it would be somewhat similar to Voodoo Vince.
From the back streets of the French Quarter to gloopy swamps, Voodoo Vince’s depiction of New Orleans is equal parts bizarre and fascinating, depicted in warm, vibrant colors with a hint of multicolored magic.
The game admittedly plays a little fast and loose with the actual concepts of voodoo, but that just means it’s easier for Vince to do all sorts of horrible stuff to himself and have backlash against every enemy around him.
Tell us you wouldn’t watch a Burton movie about a little Voodoo Doll running all over the place, tormenting jerks.
1Grim Fandango
One More About Death
Grim Fandango Remastered
Can we fit one more game about death and the afterlife on this list? By gum, we can try, and if it’s going to be anything, it’s going to be Grim Fandango.
Burton’s death-centric films, Corpse Bride especially, have a bit of a deterministic quality to them. Your life may be over, but that doesn’t mean yourlifeis over, somethingGrim Fandangoillustrates in an interesting way.
Grim Fandango takes a rathersober look at the underworld, specifically the multilayered underworld of the Aztec afterlife. In this world, departed souls must undertake an arduous four-year journey to reach the land of eternal rest at the center.
However, many souls, like our protagonist Manny, managed to still find themselves stuck in a rut at the proverbial starting line.
The world of Grim Fandango is fully realized and packed with people who are doing their best to make a life after life, mostly out of fear and uncertainty of whatever may come next.
Rather than be dramatic about it, though, the game has a very dry wit. Even if you’re dead, you still got a nine-to-five to work.
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