There is a game called Space Funeral. Upon starting it up, you're greeted with a green face that drips blood, the three options to choose from: Blood, Blood, or Blood. Your character, Phillip, is a bald man clad in pajamas who cannot stop crying.

This game is one of the most unique experiences I've ever had.

I say this after completing the game, because nothing can truly describe everything that Space Funeral does and succeeds at. While playing the game around some of my friends, one of them looks over at my screen and tells me that it's "really unnerving." And I love every minute of it.

So, as visuals go, this game looks TERRIBLE. Everything is (purposely) drawn and animated in an incredibly limited way, so that it's incredibly difficult to tell what something is or what it could possibly do. But even if the visuals were translated to a form that is easier on the eyes, it would still have the same sort of unsettling feel. People scattered around towns take the forms of people missing heads, blood spewing out of their pixelated heads, pigs with monocles or t-shirts, bandits with massive heads, or, in the case of your companion, a horse made entirely of severed legs.

Working in conjunction with the visuals is the equally unsettling dialogue, which is usually obscure literary quotes mixed with expletives, is also utterly depressing. In the first room of the game, a man who is presumed to be your father tells you "Your mother and I think you should leave."

Yikes.

The score is fantastic, composed of various electronic songs and a few tracks from mysterious Japanese psychedelic rock band Les Rallizes Denudes, which I recommend highly. Their music has a strange aura of nostalgia and something that feels like the soundtrack to a life winding towards its end, which is altogether appropriate for Space Funeral.

My point is not that Space Funeral is an enjoyable experience once one breaks through its tough-to-look-at exterior, or even that it's a hidden gem that deserves recognition. It's more of that it shows how a work doesn't need to appeal in any way to a broad audience to be acclaimed, and it doesn't need anything resembling polish if it can give off the proper mood. As people and consumers of media, we like everything to be easy to access or see the point of, but when a baseline of quality automatically filters out games like Space Funeral, we as a society lose out on several hidden gems of all mediums, whether they be games, music, movies, or books.

Which isn't to say that some works of bad quality aren't just poorly done but still works of art. For every Space Funeral, there are thousands of Steward HK Lar Lovers.

(Space Funeral can be found for FREE here.)