Whatever your opinion on recent puzzle adventure game Magrunner: Dark Pulse, it's hard to deny that the game's twisting narrative and setting are rather unique. Sure, there's the obvious comparison's with Valve's popular Portal series, from the gleaming metallic test chambers, to the elevators in-between puzzles. Yet development studio 3 AM Games has worked hard to give the experience its own unparalleled feel. There's the core focus on magnetism as a game mechanic, for starters. The Magtech glove allows players to charge objects with positive or negative loads, causing attracting and repelling forces and ultimately leading to a solution in each room. "Magnetism is something that really fascinates a lot of people from a young age," the game's narrative developer Doug Burchill tells me. "I still remember the day in elementary school that we started to learn about bar magnets and iron fillings. Give a grown adult a set of magnets and we'll still play with them." Burchill believes that it's the act of playing around with invisible forces to create visible effects that makes up the attraction (excuse the pun). "It's a perfect medium for the first-person puzzler genre," he concludes. "We had seen what other games like Portal, Qube, and Quantum Conundrum had done with their own in-game puzzle solving tools, and realized that magnetism would allow us to take it in a different direction with different effects, but still be something that players would enjoy." When it came to exploring the sorts of puzzle mechanisms that magnetism offered, Magrunner's sci-fi setting allowed the 3 AM Games team to think outside the box. "All the concepts we looked into started to build on each other," notes Burchill. "What if we had these giant magnetic platforms that the player had to ride on? What if we had electromagnets and superconductors? Wait! What if we had a miniaturized cold-fusion reactor combined with an electromagnet in a box!? What could you do with that?" Of course, getting all futuristic with the possibilities of magnetism is one thing, but balancing the fundamentals of the phenomena with mechanics that will actually be enjoyable in video game form is essential to keeping the player's attention. "The physics were very tricky to balance," the developer admits. "We have this speculative technology in the game, and we had to decide just how powerful the repulsion and attraction would be. Unreal is a very dynamic engine and allowed us to test different levels of realism in the game. The more realistically the magnets behaved, the harder they were for the player to control. In some of the early builds, the forces were so powerful that they ended up killing the player." There was a hugely interesting bit of psychology involved too. One of the first things I noticed when playing Magrunner was that the fundamental idea that opposites attract and likes repel had been reversed -- indeed, if you bring two positively-charged objects together in the game, then will stick to each other like glue. The reasoning for this, Burchill explains, is that when the team initially programmed the polarities to behave as per real-world magnetism, it was discovered that the reaction times of players bottomed out. "It was a very interesting bit of psychology to see that even when a player knew that opposite polarity colors should attract each other, they reacted much quicker when using the same colors to attract magnets and different colors to repel them," says Burchill. "We had to break from reality in a few aspects. Ultimately, we had to remember that Magrunner is a game that's supposed to be fun and accessible, and that our crowdfunding backers wanted challenging puzzles with easy controls."

Orwellian Lovecraft

Putting the magnets aside, Magrunner's storyline meanders through a variety of different inspirations and settings. The Orwellian Big Brother arc of the story is apparent from the get-go, with a megacorporation funding the entire Magrunner project. "A lot of it evolved naturally during the writing of the story, as well as subtle elements of disenfranchisement and class/genetic discrimination," Burchill notes. And then there's the Cthulhu Mythos found later in the game, inspired of course by H.P. Lovecraft's work, but also by the kind of cyber-social dystopia that William Gibson and Philip K. Dick wrote about. "We knew that we wanted Magrunner to have that cyberpunk edge in terms of game, technology, and story," says the dev. "Then, somebody said 'Cthulhu,' and the rest of us said 'Oh, yeah...' After we tinkered with a few drafts of the story outline, we started to realize that we had something very different on our hands, something that hadn't been done yet." But the most important piece of the puzzle was making sure that magnetism, Big Brother, Lovecraft and the Portal setting all fitted firmly together. "It was important to make sure that each element was integral and interconnected," says Burchill. "We had to decide what the necessary elements of the story were to get the plot across and keep it enjoyable for the players." Magrunner is available to purchase from Steam.