I was going to stall for time and muse on what makes a RPG weird, but I've been reminded of the weirdest game I've played, and that was Evolution Pulse.
Look at that creepy cover. You don't know where it's going but it's going to take you there with style.
EP is set in a terrifying post-apocalyptic world where what remains of humanity shelters under the oversight of several AI-run safezone. The planet has been over-run by a global effect broadcast by a little black box that nobody knew how to control, and now large swathes of the landscape look like Hieronymus Bosch went through an angsty teenage phase and got the black paint involved. The problems aren't static either: entities called the Hekath have been magicked into existence and seem generally ill-at-ease with sharing the place with others.
Players take the role of Executors, crafted by their home AI as cyborgs or genetically engineered commandos or beings of pure thought manifested physically, and undertake missions of various types, usually involving some over-the-top violence, desperate situations, hard decisions and terrible revelations. So far, so good.
What made it especially weird for me is that it's based on the Fate Accelerated system, but with a tweak I'd never seen. FAE gives you a half-dozen Approaches, not really skills as much as just how you approach a task or difficulty. Evolution Pulse gives you six Approaches, sure, but they're not guaranteed to be the same as the next character's. It's a novel approach (gah), and something I'd like to explore further in the future.
