The lost wonder of Minecraft comes back in Lucid Blocks

A hideous being stands in front of me, with a fleshy body rendered fuzzy through heavy dithering, and a cracked spherical head with the unsettling happy face of 1970s hippy logo. "O son of man," says the monster. "What lies ahead is a withering carcass. A bloated festering limbo, in which your soul will decay for all eternity."

The creature neglects to mention that this purgatory is a lot like Minecraft.

Lucid Blocks is a crafty block-bashing game about not knowing what fresh hell this is. You are very likely dead, or possibly just extremely asleep. The surreal world that forms around you is, like Minecraft, procedurally generated from a seed - in this case, a single word. You crumble blocks, gather them to your hotbar, and plop them down. There is some end goal, the creature tells you, but only in "oblivion" does it exist.

Remember your first steps into the world of Minecraft? I do. It was 2010 and I was crashing in a friend's spare room as the Yorkshire winter rendered us all desperate for ale. Minecraft was an escape into a blocky dimension where you could build a far more affordable home, a cabin in the woods, or more likely a castle in a meadow. But you first had to figure out what blocks to put together to make a useful tool. Back then, before it had any reasonable tutorial and long before the guides-industrial complex turned their fierce unyielding eye to the game, you had to ask friends, look things up in a forum, or try out a bunch of shapes yourself and see what happens.

This was a simple form of chemistry. It wasn't the main appeal of Minecraft, that was absolutely everything else the game did. But its initially cryptic approach to recipes was an added bit of figure-it-out flavour. 

Lucid Blocks is like learning a freakish new form of that same chemistry. You are given a ritualistic circle and can place any block or object at the periphery. Slap in two or more objects and pull a lever. You may invent the clay tile. You may invent a magical garden fork called "Cristella's Bane" that can dismantle hard blocks in a single bash. I don't have the recipe book, and part of me hopes it is never written. But you can scribble your own notes in the blank pages of a journal included in your "paraphernalia" menu.

There are enemies, some of them more instinctively horrifying than others. Shout out to the big spider made of shifting rainbow colours that will kill you in two swift bites. At least, I think it is biting, when it makes that horrendous chomping buzz and its central segment fuzzes like TV static. 

There are sheep, whose edible flesh is rendered as a kind of soft toy fish to gobble. This heals you. Good for when you are surprise electrified by the floating shapes which fly through the air making freakish child-laughing noises.

When you combine enough strange items or blocks, or kill enough enemies with your bare hands, you earn gifts from the unseen lords of this realm. Some of these are familiar - the Rejuvenation Anchor is a respawn point like any old bed in Minecraft. Others perform a familiar role but in an altogether more dreamlike way.

For example, the Clonaqualia block does the job of a chest, in that you can store blocks there. But instead of just being a box with item spaces, it teleports you wholesale to a tiny pocket dimension, where you have a personal floating island in the middle of a grand void, to build and stock things as you wish before returning to the overhell.

Frightened of this world? Sorry, this qualia. That is OK. You can visit the "firmament" which is basically a way to download the qualia of other players. Mine was a flat otherplace of empty grey apartment blocks and lonely snowy outcrops. But you might just as easily land on a verdant hill with tall superstructures of pink and green... what is that? Candy?

One qualia I visited was a rainy gloomsteppe full of small towers, and I was getting damaged every few seconds. I thought: "Oh no, is the rain here acidic?" But when I escaped the rain it still hurt. I stepped out of the moonlight and into the shade of a tower. The damage stopped. The moon was the enemy. I looked at it and saw an accursed, grimacing face that shone pain. 

You also download the entire inventory of the qualia's owner from whenever they saved their world, making it the perfect place to experiment with that cryptic recipe system without loss. Combine magnetite with raw sheep flesh. Ah, so that's how you create 43 cysts. Good to know. Smash some scrap wood and an unspecified appendage together to give you a bouquet of Visognia flowers, whatever those are. Put wool into an empty glass capsule to create a kind of sheep molotov cocktail that will spawn a baaing critter wherever you throw it. 

God, it's just so neat to smoosh things together and pull the lever to see what happens. One of our best games of the decade was browser game Infinite Craft and this has a lot of the same feeling of organic recipe discovery, with the added esoterica of existing in a land just south of understanding. It is destined to be labelled "Minecraft on acid" but I prefer to think of it another way, as Minecraft with its sense of mystery restored.