Just three steps away is the pedestal housing my prize: a phial of genetic material I can use to feed the strange mutant who keeps my base powered up and safe in the barren wastelands. The journey to reach this point was bloody and arduous, but at last, I’ve overcome every trial and outwitted the fiend who built this heinous maze. I permit myself a smile of satisfaction as I step forward to grab the material – and quickly realize how naive I was. The fake walls vanish, hidden monsters spring into action, and as an added, final insult, a bevy of bombs bounce into view and send my lifeless body careening into the abyss.
A brutal, crushing end. I can’t wait to do it again.
This is Meet Your Maker from Dead By Daylight developer Behaviour Interactive, a new, asynchronous multiplayer game that’s like Super Mario Maker, but with murder. I had a chance to go hands-on with Meet Your Maker ahead of its big Game Awards reveal and came away excited over its clever spin on the building genre and intuitive methods of teaching players how to improve.
Meet Your Maker puts you in a post-apocalyptic future on a fancy space base powered by The Chimera. This frightful little creature housed in a test tube keeps your base’s lights on and helps you stay alive, but you have to feed it genetic material, and you can only get that from the mazes and death traps other players have built across the galaxy.
You have two choices. You can raid other players’ bases for genetic material and hopefully make it back alive to upgrade your loadout, or you can build bases of your own to confound and destroy any who dare enter it in the hopes of stealing your genetic material. (If they do succeed, you lose out on nothing unless you crank the difficulty up to its highest level).
Meet Your Maker creative director Ash Pannell walked me through the basics of raiding at first with an entry-level creation. The first thing that struck me about it was bombs. I mean literally — bombs struck me, right in the face. When I respawned, the second thing that struck me was how intuitive Meet Your Maker’s learning process is. That first disaster taught me a handful of important lessons within seconds, and not just about how to avoid getting blown up. Subtle environmental clues and layout designs help point out traps – or trick you into thinking you know where danger is before the real trap springs – and spark inspiration for how to design your own base.
That first run ended in success. The second, more difficult base threw monsters at me instead of bombs, prompting a quick loadout swap where I added a handy shield to my arsenal. Poor timing with the shield led to quick deaths for Ash and myself, but eventually, we made it through and even managed to survive the extra-devious traps that trigger after you grab the genetic material.
Now it was time to build a base of my own. The preview version of Meet Your Maker that Behaviour shared had every available block, trap, and monster unlocked already — ordinarily, you acquire these as you upgrade your base. I tend to spend time planning first before laying the first block in building games, so to save everyone the agony of watching me sit silently and think, I watched Ash bring an elaborate, yet simple tower of death to life with just a handful of tools.
One of Meet Your Maker’s biggest strengths is how uncomplicated its foundational tools are. With just a few block types, some monsters, and a handful of traps, you can transform even a basic layout into a mind-bending maze. The only requirement is that the harvester robot must have an unblocked path to the genetic material, though you can change the path during the building process, diverting it into a pool of plasma blocks, steering raiders into spike pits, and so on.
Ash created an open chamber with strategically placed bombardier enemies whose projectiles could cover the entire room and tucked some bomb traps in hard-to-spot corners. It might sound unfair, but Meet Your Maker’s hazards only trigger when you see them. You won’t have a monster attack until you enter its line of sight, and traps won’t trigger unless they actually enter your field of vision – though whether you spot them in time is another matter.
While Ash activated some mods on the existing traps and monsters to make them even more unpredictable, I pitched in a bit and tucked a few spike traps and a melee monster in a newly-created underground area that we decided to force raiders into first. Block styles and decals give you a range of subtle ways for directing a raider’s attention where you want it to go. Alternate textures may give the impression of a safer route, while a light over an entry way is almost guaranteed to lure raiders in.
Once everything was in place, the next step was watching while other team members – confined to a different call room during the building process – tackled our creation. Behaviour lets you watch raids from multiple perspectives, including third person and through the eyes of one of the raiders, to help provide feedback on how players interact with your creation. While we thought the base design seemed watertight, the raiders instantly noticed something we overlooked — a hole in the design that would have let them bypass some of our traps had they not been charitable enough to follow the intended path.
Other raiders won’t be so generous, of course, and that’s how you learn to build better bases. Replays and skull markers let you see which traps worked, where you can improve, and how to shore up your defenses. Raiders can leave endorsements based on how brutal, fun, or ingenious your base was, and Meet Your Maker uses those to determine which bases should rise to the top of the selection list. The goal is avoiding a situation like Super Mario Maker, where the same handful of popular stages stays at the top forever, so no base lasts for longer than a month or so before it disappears and you have to build again.
The freedom to create and experiment and the valuable feedback you get just from playing the game itself give this brutal builder a much lower barrier of entry than you might expect. I went into the preview intrigued and left much more eager to try my hand at building more bases than I expected. Fortunately for me, I don’t have long to wait. Meet Your Maker launches on PlayStation, Xbox, and PC via Steam on April 4, 2023.
Written by Josh Broadwell on behalf of GLHF
