"When you look at Retro/Grade, certainly I think it's a fun game," Gilgenbach says. "I think it's a great game, but Harmonix, for example, could create a better Retro/Grade than I could. They have the music licensing and the higher budgets, all that stuff."

He made a great Retro/Grade, he argues, but not the greatest possible Retro/Grade. So Gilgenbach and his new studio, Infinitap Games, began work with this question: What was the game he could make better than anyone else?

His simple, optimistic hypothesis is this: Everyone has such a diverse set of life experiences that if they could draw them all into one single creation, it would be the one thing they would be the best suited to make in all the world.

For Gilgenbach, that game is Neverending Nightmares, a dark tapestry of psychological horror woven from threads of his own struggle with mental health.

"I think Neverending Nightmares is the game I can create better than anyone else, just because it's so personal to me," he says. "I have all these negative images and negative emotions I can channel into making this psychological horror experience."

In Nightmares, the game's lead wakes up from a horrific dream, only to discover he's only awakened in a new nightmare, the beginning of a terrible cycle that will create a basic structure for the narrative. It gives Infinitap the ability not only to keep the player guessing about the story, but to give them a say through their decisions in how it ends.

This is not just the game Gilgenbach thinks he's best suited to make; it's also the one he couldn't bear to abandon if it turned out to be the final project of his indie development career. With money tighter than ever, he's well aware that this could be his last shot at a personal game.

The idea of a psychological thriller was one Gilgenbach originally envisioned on a grand scale with 3D, motion capture, the works. But when he decided it was the project he had to make with the resources at hand, he scaled back, peeling away any layers that didn't contribute to the central theme.

He's working in two dimensions this time, and in a black-and-white palette that couldn't be more dissimilar to Retro/Grade's neon-bathed fever dream aesthetics — especially surprising considering the bulk of the work was created by Grabowski, the man behind Retro/Grade's distinctive look.

And Gilgenbach has brought on a new collaborator, Daniel Sass, whom he struck up a friendship with a decade ago while the pair worked together at Heavy Iron Studios.

"Matt was one of the shining stars on the projects that I worked on with him and I always wanted to collaborate on something," Sass says. "When this came up, it seemed like a good opportunity to work together and do something interesting."