I have a confession: I’ve never played Minecraft. In fact, I probably never will play Minecraft. I love the concept of boundless creation, but its particular brand of retro-looking sandbox play just doesn’t appeal to me. No, I’m more of a Little Big Planet kind of person; that game allows for wonderful, whimsical creation but inside a world of more clever machinations. Wait a minute, what!? There’s a game that combines them both?
I have a confession: I’ve never played Minecraft. In fact, I probably never will play Minecraft. I love the concept of boundless creation, but its particular brand of retro-looking sandbox play just doesn’t appeal to me. No, I’m more of a Little Big Planet kind of person; that game allows for wonderful, whimsical creation but inside a world of more clever machinations. Wait a minute, what!? There’s a game that combines them both?
Say hello to M?K. Currently vying for your votes on Steam’s Greenlight platform, the game takes place in a galactic playground. A seemingly endless compendium of “twisting, shattering islands” lost adrift in the far reaches of a galaxy we’ve never seen before. There, players will tinker their way through what is being billed as a “uniquely structured free-form single player / co-op campaign,” while also engaging in multiplayer competitions, and unbound play.
If it sounds confusing, don’t worry; not everything in the game has been set in stone. With that said, M?K looks to be an ambitious combination of many beloved game types and elements into one fluid experience. At the core of it all will be the game’s building mechanic. Players piece together literal building blocks, each with their own properties, to make everything from transportation, to switches, to weapons, to circuitry. With completed creations, emergent gameplay possibilities will arise, says developer Verge Game Studio. In an online forum, programmer and artist Sebastian Patric has been quoted as boiling it down to a “bunch of multi-player game modes on top of a physics sandbox featuring some pretty deep building mechanics and relative gravity.”
As in Super Mario Galaxy, players will be able to run without worry around any surface of their given planets and satellites; here, however, the goal is multi-faceted. Ward off AI monsters in a free-roam single player or co-op campaign to still an awakened evil; compete in multiplayer modes using your created weaponry to lay bombs or deadly traps; get away from it all by building a couch and floating it off into space.
Normally, I’m wary when I see something that looks like it’s attempting to be the “kitchen sink game.” The title that has something for everyone, and usually does very little of it well. With M?K, however, the themes are so strong, and the universe so beautifully realized, that I’m hard pressed not to feel the industry could use an experiment like it.
Click here to vote yes for M?K on Steam Greenlight.
Greenlight Spotlight is a featured series on Gamezebo that profiles Steam Greenlight candidates that deserve your vote. We’re doing this in the hopes of calling attention to interesting projects that would benefit from distribution on Steam, so please, if a game looks like something you’d want to play, don’t hesitate to lend it your support!
