Haunted computers, jersey devils, mothmen, and other such monsters patrol the area, liable to chomp on unfortunate passersby unless you hit them so many times that they explode into a big wispy skull. Tres-Bashers (which is apparently a play on “trespassers” rather than, as I keep reading it, the Spanish word for “three”) tosses you into a school after-hours, armed with a flashlight and a baseball bat for an irresistible blend of cryptid hunting and property damage. It’s a highly persuasive work of mood and atmosphere that, despite a more “traditional” style of progression and level design, retains the strangeness of dreams and their capacity to enrapture as much as unsettle, in things like a flirtatious door and a shopping mall that seems to age as you move through it. Perhaps the most impressive thing is how this game totally transcends that potentially tired lava-world/snow-world progression despite playing in a similar sandbox, infused instead with bizarre secrets and gorgeous imagination and curiously existential tangents. But while developer sodaraptor retains the dream concept and an era-appropriate style of chunky polygons, Hypnagogia pulls considerable influence from another hallmark of the time period: bright platformers across multiple elemental worlds. The original ( free!) Hypnagogia grew out of an entry for a game jam based around the surreal PS1 game LSD: Dream Emulator. I couldn’t devote as much time to Black Book as I’d have liked, and I couldn’t keep a lid on my arachnophobia for enough of Nix Umbra. There are, as there will always be, others that didn’t make the cut, for a variety of reasons. This list features some of the games that I hadn’t yet made it to during my attempt at a 2021 roundup of great indie games. At some point, you have to cut off one year and then wade into the deluge of new releases for the next. Time is the enemy of so many things: car tires, marriage, caffeine retention, and the task of staying “current” in a field of entertainment.
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