Meet Your Maker Preview: Torture Your Friends for Fun and Leisure

Last year, I got a sampling of Meet Your Maker, Behaviour Interactive’s quirky follow up to Dead By Daylight. But thanks to Steam’s Next Fest, I got to sink back into some dusty post-apocalyptic bunkers full of sweet, sweet GenMat. And even though this demo wasn’t much different than the previous one, I did get to spend more time with the outpost construction, fiddling with the specifics of how to get a dirty little kill factory up and running and maintaining and upgrading it over a short amo unt of time. I only got a few days out of it, but this game is shaping up to be a truly unique entry in a genre that’s just waiting for its next big thing.

Base-b uilding can be confusing at first, with all the resources and parameters sort of thrown at you all at once. It took me about a half-hour to get it all down, but once I got going, putting together a coherent dungeon was quite straightforward. To even start, though, you need to buy a plot of land called a burial site. In them are some randomly placed immovable objects like stone blocks and the prized GenMat. The remaining empty space is yours to build in, using traps and guardians you can buy from your sanctuary. Each one of these plots have a maximum build capacity though, so choose wisely.

To make a complete, raidable outpost, you need meet a minimum amount of defenses, and the passive harvester drone has to be able to walk to the GenMat prize on foot. Outside of that, you can do all sorts of stuff. One of the coolest outposts I saw was just a big open room where a mix of flying shooters and walking brutes did their damndest to stop you. I went the exact opposite route, choosing a simple 1000-point plot and had a simple plan in mind: a short, claustrophobic dungeon with simple-yet-effective ways to die. I set some traps up, put down some gnarly mutant guards, set their patrol paths by hand and viola, Bicknell was ready for show time.

I got a lot of mileage from spiked panels, walls full of bolt throwers, and crushing pistons.

The traps themselves run the gamut of recognizable staples. I got a lot of mileage from spiked panels, walls full of bolt throwers, and crushing pistons, but my raids put me up against things like bomb launchers, flamethrowers, and hooks that can snatch you up and pin you down to be easy pickings for some other terrible fate. I found a little less variety from the guardians, but both sets of defenses can be modified and upgraded to do things like trigger multiple times, empower your mutant guards, or even make traps that don’t arm themselves until after the invader grabs their prize. There’s a lot you can spend your resources on, and you’ll need to get your priorities straight as soon as you can because grinding to earn these things can be laborious.

As I raid other outposts, mine will passively earn me resources, but whenever I snare another victim the Chimera lets me know in its own little way. When you go back to check in, you can see where individual players died, what killed them, and you can collect a little bonus bounty littered among their digital tombstones. If you want more details, you can actually watch people run your dungeon, which can be particularly illuminating for making tweaks and further optimizing your creation.

There’s a limit to the length of time your outpost stays actively maiming curious enemy raiders, based on how long it would take your creation to passively extract GenMat (a limit that changes based on the plot you buy). You can expand this limit by opting to prestige your outpost, which levels it up, adds to your build limit, and resets the GenMat extraction timer, starting the cycle over again. Good if you can’t afford to keep multiple outposts up and running but want to bump your income a bit, I’m not sure the demo period was a long enough time to figure out what the long-term incentive of something like this would be besides watching the numbers go up faster.

Can Meet Your Maker spice up the first-person shooter in a meaningful way? Mashing scarcity, fast-paced action, and base-building together in one tight package makes a good case for it, but we’ll see more when it finally launches on April 4th.