The indie games industry is, for the most part, devoid of skillful originality. Logically this seems false, as indie games have developed somewhat of an anti-AAA, counterculture stance of development, but that stance does not reflect an indication of skillful originality. If I had a dollar ever time I saw some indie developer claim they were reinventing the way that stories were told in games, and then ended up just making another first-person story-focused walking simulator, I could personally fund one of those games on Kickstarter. I have been lucky enough to play a few genuinely mechanically innovative or original indie games—Obra Dinn for its deduction-bending pocketwatch, or Gunpoint for its snappy mix of stealth and puzzle-solving—but I tend to find that games are at their best when they relish in their inspirations’ foundations, and seek out originality in other avenues. Undertale fleshes out a simple JRPG lookalike with a colorful and emotionally involved story; Stardew Valley uses its luscious palette and soundtrack to draw the player into its Harvest Moon-inspired world; and Celeste combines nailbiting difficulty with tight controls to make one of the best platformers of all time.

Hylics, from a foundational perspective, is pretty ordinary. It plays out like a very short, shrunken JRPG, as you build out a party of four members, gain money from combat to dress them up with hot gear, and learn new spells and moves to fight enemies. Outside of this gameplay foundation, however, Hylics has some of the most unique direction I’ve ever seen. Lindroth’s art is the result of an ayahuasca-induced orgy between Gaudi, Geiger, and Cronenberg, with grotesque and pungent portraits of oil and clay composing an abstract and arid world. Expressionist, polygonal shapes and structures pierce through the epidermis of this utterly strange and esoteric world; whilst randomly generated text produces order from chaos, strangeness from normalcy, madness from truth. In this manner it produced an emotion that I previously thought to be precluded in games—that of utter strangeness and discovery. It is, in this manner, a production of hinged unhingedness, pieced together from the digested scraps of autophiliac artistry.