Magrunner Mixes Blade Runner, Portal, And... Cthulhu?
At the very least, I have to give 3AM Games credit for fearlessly dumping all their favorite things into a blender and hoping for the best. Last time I did that, I got a runny soup of pumpkin pie, ice cream, and the collected works of Robert Heinlein. 3AM, though, is calling its thematic Frankenstein monster Magrunner, describing it as "a first-person action puzzle game set in a cyberpunk reimagining of H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos." There's an eerily Portal-2-esque trailer after the break. I hope the final version is rife with snarky narrations from the squid-shaped End of Days himself.
As you may have noticed, there's also a bunch of crowdfunding stuff that ties in with Kickstarter-but-for-games service Gamesplanet. Interestingly, however, Magrunner's already fully funded and fairly far along in development, so all proceeds will go toward additional features like PVP multiplayer. The plan, then, is to launch a demo in a couple months and seek extensive feedback from players, and apparently, Magrunner won't even launch until players are happy with it. So, if nothing else, I'm interested in seeing how that goes for them, since it's basically crowdfunding times ten billion and with a cherry on top.
But yeah, the trailer didn't exactly give a good sense for how puzzles will work, and goodness, I could mistake it for Portal 2 from far away, strike up a conversation with it on those grounds, and continue mistaking it for Portal 2 while it continually shouted "Dude, I'm not Portal 2. Please go away." So hopefully, the cyberthulu theme will steer Magrunner in more interesting directions as time goes on. But hey, if nothing else, perhaps it'll finally teach us how magnets work.