I was five minutes into the excavation of my very first, procedurally generated Lucid Blocks map when I struck Dogblock, Catblock and S’more, in that order. I didn’t excavate them, actually. I conjured them by feeding gobbets of occult, dreamlike material into the “Apotheosis” magic circle that is possibly this sort-of-survival game’s crafting screen, and possibly a gateway to some astral sphere.

For clarity, dogblocks and catblocks are blocks with dog and cat faces, while S’mores are a kind of marshmallow and chocolate sandwich. You don’t eat s’mores in Lucid Blocks. You build with them and, if you have to, beat sheep to death with them. Things you can eat in Lucid Blocks include fuzzy stuffed clownfish, pleasingly rendered from photography of actual soft toys. They’re not called clownfish here, mind. As far as I can remember (I forgot to jot the combination down in the notebook, which offers a choice of scratchy pens and inks to scribble with) the “clownfish” are alchemised from druidic stone and chunks of mutton.

This doesn’t seem very lucid to me. Perhaps it will make more sense if I keep playing the game, and forget everything I ever knew about real-life clownfish, which basically consists of what I’ve seen in Finding Nemo.

Lucid Blocks might look like another Backroomy exercise in free-associating bits of eerie ephemera. Memeslop? Unheimlichslop? The Steam page refers to it as “surreal, ethereal, and liminal”, which sounds like a crafting recipe for “spacey worn-out gobshite”, though I do suspect developer Lucy B. Locks of being whimsical, here – and in any case, I will forgive them because I like the poesy of the subsequent “fend against fiendful foes”.

You might also dismiss Lucid Blocks as a Weird Minecraft map pack that doesn’t need to be a standalone game, because Minecraft already admits of all the weirdness humanity has to offer. But the free-associative element feels transformative in a way that also counters the argument about this being just another “WTF game” for the streamers to boggle at between triple-A releases.

The crafting system runs on dream logic, not the usual rhythms of “flint + stick = flint axe”. It feels like you’re dredging the internet’s subconsciousness. Dogblocks and catblocks are trawling a shallower shelf of bizarre/cute virality, admittedly, but I don’t quite understand how I got a catblock from a dogblock, and I certainly can’t explain how I ended up with that s’more.

Towards the end of my very brief opening run, I spent a pleasant few moments on the shore of a blinding silver sea, trying to turn my s’mores into one of the equipment items mentioned on the Steam page – “grappling hooks, bee gliders, bombs, ball wands, blades, haze hands, and cute accessories”. I created mushrooms and grassblocks instead. Then I burrowed into the wall behind and a faceless pink manikin emerged and murdered me. “Despondent vermin,” the game told me sympathetically, as I drifted among creampuff clouds. “May your death bring forth new life.”

Liminal Blocks is a looker, for sure. My starting map consisted of bare, crenellated monoliths emerging from a pea-soup sky. It felt enchanted but also treacherous and unforgiving, which is how I like my fantasy worlds. Other possible spaces include “cities of plastic” and what look like looping warehouse chasms. The use of physical props (including what I assume are the developer’s own hands) for items and animations is an immediate delight. It reminds me of Eclipsium, but it doesn’t make me wince quite as hard.

Find the game on Steam. I’ll probably keep playing. I wonder if this could be as unhinging as Yedoma Globula. I want to build a whole cathedral out of cats and dogs.