Best Abstract Games on Steam
Games built from shapes, systems, symbols, or ideas instead of literal settings.
Browse all Abstract →
1Milk inside a bag of milk inside a bag of milk - A short story about what sort of challenges everyday little things can be. Help the girl buy milk, be the first not to disappoint her.
Aug 26, 2020
In this game, you can…
- be the voice in a girl's head, choosing whether to reassure her or tear her down.
- get addressed directly as if you're a new medication, and have to type "No" with the exact capitalization the game demands.
- walk to a store by counting steps and obsessing over where each foot lands so the "predestined coordinates" stay correct.
- talk her through buying milk when she blanks on what to do and the cashier looks like a monster to her.
- meet a warped, inhuman presence that just repeats "O" over and over while she tries to function.
- sit with her on a bench while she asks you to pick a name for yourself, like you're a real companion.
- rehearse a conversation, endure the walk, buy the milk, then make it home for a calmer, reflective walk back that only happens if you hold it together.
2Milk outside a bag of milk outside a bag of milk - A sequel to Milk inside a bag of milk inside a bag of milk. Dive into demented and bizarre world once again and help the girl become a little happier.
Dec 16, 2021
In this game, you can…
- sprint through your own house as hallways stretch impossibly long and something reaches cold fingers toward your arm.
- act as a voice in her head, trying to get her to take pills and sleep while her thoughts keep slipping away.
- trigger sudden flashbacks and even deaths just by choosing the wrong line in a conversation.
- collect her scattered thoughts around the room, then piece them together until she can finally calm down.
- repeat a mirror-before-school scene where her reflection won't cooperate, her lips won't move, and she can't force a smile.
- question whether she knows she's in a game, then watch her turn the tables and shut you down with unsettling certainty.
- replay routes where rare dialogue lines and scenes only appear with a small chance, turning repeats into new discoveries.
- examine ordinary bedroom objects as clues—scribbled notebooks, dead plants, a plugged-in laptop—to reconstruct what's happening in her mind.
3Pseudoregalia - Deep within the realm of sleep, Sybil finds herself pulled to a distorted castle. Grow strong, and unlock new abilities to build up a deep movement system, fight enemies, find secrets, and free the weary soul of Castle Sansa, in this retro-inspired 3D Platformer Metroidvania.
Jul 28, 2023
In this game, you can…
- chain a slide jump into a sideflip into a wall kick into a pole cancel backflip to reach ledges.
- sequence break by combining movement tricks to bypass ability gates and reach areas you weren't supposed to access yet.
- get upgrades from the exit side of rooms, and the game still lets it count.
- use just a couple hidden abilities to force your way through huge sections early.
- treat wall kicks like a skill ceiling, dialing in near-perfect angles to climb routes that look impossible.
- look at a vertical room, pick a weird route, and just go there if you can physically make the jumps.
- fight a standout final boss built around dodging, weaving, and reflecting projectiles despite the game keeping combat light overall.
4Antichamber - Antichamber is a mind-bending psychological exploration game where nothing can be taken for granted. Discover an Escher-like world where hallways wrap around upon each other, spaces reconfigure themselves, and accomplishing the impossible may just be the only way forward.
Jan 31, 2013
In this game, you can…
- walk into a dead end, turn back, and find you're somewhere else entirely.
- solve rooms by walking backwards, because moving normally makes the path disappear.
- use a hint as a physical object, turning the clue itself into the thing that solves the puzzle.
- turn around and watch a closed door vanish into thin air.
- climb staircases that loop into themselves and hallways that make impossible turns without ever crossing.
- keep your eyes off a room so it stays stable long enough to use.
- pick up and place blocks with a gun, then upgrade it to pull cubes along different axes to reshape the space.
- bounce back to a central map room to fast-travel between puzzles, then return later when new rules make old rooms solvable.
5shapez - shapez is an easy-going, minimalistic factory building game about the automation of shapes through extraction and satisfying production lines. Adapt to increasingly complex shapes and grow your factory across an infinitely expanding map. Your only limitation is your creativity!
Jun 7, 2020
In this game, you can…
- build a factory that reads the current demand and automatically routes, cuts, paints, rotates, and stacks shapes until it outputs the right one.
- let a fully automated setup run while you're away and come back dozens of levels later with new unlocks from all the deliveries.
- split shapes into four quadrants, dye each piece, then recombine them into a target with mixed colors and even stacked layers.
- copy-paste entire working production blocks to expand fast instead of rebuilding the same design by hand.
- inspect the request icon to see exactly how the target is constructed, then build the machinery to match what you're looking at.
- rebuild huge sections instantly with no penalty, rerouting belts and replacing machines until the layout finally clicks.
- expand forever on an infinite map with infinite resource nodes, so you can abandon cramped designs and rebuild cleanly farther out.
- deliver absurdly specific bulk orders like 50,000 purple windmills to unlock upgrades that change what your existing factory can support.
6Nodebuster - Nodebuster is a short, experimental incremental game about busting nodes and destroying reality.
Aug 13, 2024
In this game, you can…
- erase the whole screen just by moving your mouse cursor.
- fill out the tech tree until your cursor becomes invincible and enemies can't hurt you anymore.
- press a final end-game research button that makes the screen wobble and glitch for a few seconds, then rolls credits mid-chaos.
- stack upgrades until lightning bolts and explosions auto-clear enemies while you just steer through the mess.
- push to a boss gate, beat the boss once to unlock the next tier, then drop down to farm and come back to smash past walls.
- unlock bolts and drones, grab focus armor, then stop fighting head-on and instead circle swarms to vacuum up resources while dodging hits.
- crank a "harder battle" replay where enemies get tougher, then rebuild from nothing to absurd power in the same levels.
7Viewfinder - Challenge perception, redefine reality, and reshape the world around you with an instant camera. Viewfinder is a new single player game offering gamers hours of interesting and fun experiences while uncovering the mysteries left behind.
Jul 18, 2023
In this game, you can…
- pick up a painting or postcard, apply it to a surface, and step into it as a walkable 3D space.
- set a timer, take a photo of yourself, and place your own image past an obstacle to reach new areas.
- switch from copying to cutting, where photographing something removes it and you place it somewhere else.
- take a photo of a wall, rotate it, and place it as a bridge across a bottomless gap.
- photograph part of the world, place the picture elsewhere, and create a second copy of the same object.
- turn a ceiling teleporter into a floor teleporter by photographing it, rotating the shot, and placing it back down.
- retake the same shot from a slightly different position and get a meaningfully different piece of usable geometry when you place it.
- overlay a photo onto the world to carve new corners and routes through the existing geometry, sometimes reshaping the path mid-solution.
- duplicate a single useful picture multiple times and chain the copies together to build a multi-step route across several gaps.
8Iron Lung - A short horror game where you pilot a tiny submarine through an ocean of blood on an alien moon.
Mar 9, 2022
In this game, you can…
- pilot a one-man sub with no window, navigating by coordinates, sensors, and sound through a blood ocean.
- take grainy black-and-white photos, wait for them to develop, and use them as your only way to see outside.
- watch the sub deteriorate mid-mission as it shakes, leaks, catches fire, and starts flooding while you're still trapped inside.
- creep up to walls until an alarm screams, then scrape and bump your way back out while lining up the next coordinate.
- sit blind inside the hull while hissing pipes, metal groans, and moving splashes circle you somewhere in the blood.
- hop between mission nodes to photograph points of interest, staying still just long enough to hear what's out there.
- reach the final node, take the last required photo, and trigger a big scare as the payoff to the whole run.
- read terminal fragments in the sub to piece together a setting where the stars vanished and humanity is scavenging what's left.
920 Small Mazes - This is a puzzle game with twenty small mazes. They're good mazes, though.
Feb 16, 2024
In this game, you can…
- navigate the main menu by walking a maze on a messy desktop.
- fold and unfold an entire labyrinth until a path lines up.
- rotate and reposition the whole maze around two fixed pegs to reach the exit.
- finish a level and watch its paper get burned away to clear the desk.
- assemble a maze like a jigsaw, rotating and snapping pieces together until the corridors connect.
- break through walls when the maze's structure is designed to shatter.
- follow a clue and dig square-by-square along a route until you uncover hidden treasure.
- play a kids-drawing maze where you pick up a sword and shield, then use them to beat a monster.
10Hylics - Hylics is a recreational program with light JRPG elements.
Oct 2, 2015
In this game, you can…
- split frozen burritos into weapons or healing by keeping them cold for projectiles or microwaving them into food.
- learn new spells by finding TV sets, as long as the party member you want to teach is present when you watch.
- grind the flesh of dead enemies at Death's entrance to earn Meat Points that feed your health bar.
- die, come back, and upgrade your maximum health based on the meat you collected from enemies before you went down.
- use random objects like paper cups and ancient machines as upgrades that raise your magic instead of normal stat boosts.
- feed pet cockroaches and bring a horse as a weapon you can use in combat like it's completely ordinary.
- travel across dimensions, then end up making sandcastles on a beach in the afterlife within the first minutes.
- clear an area permanently because enemies don't respawn, so places you've swept stop having future battles there.
