Incredibly ugly but good games

"ugly" is very personal because there is a lot of factors going on, from personal opinion (pixel art is good or bad) to how many years a game has (Deus ex is better with the graphical mod? what about Morrowind?)

So, overall, I vote for Deadly Premonion, although I barely played it. I have it on Steam and GOG. it's a cult game and a HORRIBLE port. With old mechanics, a fix who only fix it partially, random crashes, "old" graphics for its time... Yet it's a cult game, very Twin Peakesque.

1. The Cat Lady
2. The Cat Lady
3. The Cat Lady
4. The Cat Lady

Contra!

some might say Teleglitch but personally I dig the aesthetic

The Adventures of Tree

Her Story and To the Moon. The former is a great game, the latter is not bad but very highly acclaimed.

What classifies a game as "ugly" is pretty subjective...
For me good games tend to be good at all categories or at the very least achieve what they were aiming for. So those with less impressive graphics were either aiming for an "old look", the graphics in them are irrelevant to the rest of the game or they just did the best they could with the technology they had available at the time.
What I find truly ugly are some of those zero effort absolutely terrible games that come out of Greenlight (mostly the ones Jim Sterling covers since I wouldn't pay any attention to them otherwise). They are bad in every regard, including visuals. So I guess I don't have any examples for good "ugly" games, because being ugly comes with being terrible.

Some of these 4k 120FPS kids these days might call it ugly (imo it's just a good old game) but I've been enjoying TES:Arena. And after I finish te story I'm gonna try TES II:Daggerfall.

No More Room In Hell maybe?
Zombie Panic Source neigh bee?
Every RPGmaker game in existence since 99.9% of them aren't original anything. but of course a tiny amount of them are good
RazenRoth

Bad Rats.

Powermonger

Most people would say it's ugly, no doubt, but I actually like the way the game looks. It's a really great game, too.

The first Geneforge just looks attrocious, with those puke-green borders, but it's actually a really good CRPG.

Divils Diggers. Incredibly ugly and incredibly bad .

View attached image.

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The Binding of Isaac %(
I like this game, but this cheap over-primitive style, meh

RollerCoaster Tycoon 1 & 2.
3 looks the best but plays the worst.
Sooner or later I'll be getting Parkitect.

What do you mean by 'ugly' ? Most of old games looks bad now ( with some exceptions ) and part of them are good. Does that make them ugly? No ,they are just have outdated visuals.

ArmA Cold War Assault.

Graphics from 2001, hands down the best mil-sim campaign(s) to date.

The Room
It's an idle game, with a really innmmersive atmosphere.

Cortex Command
Ugly, unwieldy, buggy; super fun though

Live a live, use the same motor from FFIV and FFV, (maybe you ask why?, well, FFVI was released before a few months when this game came out)
but the rest, ufff, its so f*cking good, specially the main villain, easy one of the best i have met and, its ironic, but you can't hate him

A lot of early 3D games in the mid 1990s falls into this category. A lot haven't aged well because of the low polygon count.