Meet Your Maker remembers when game designers loved deathtraps

Are you reading this, Muszkatuł Gałkowy? Up yours, you spike-obsessed, wall-faking, bomb-dropping disgrace. I'll get you. I'll get you. Oh, sorry everybody! This article began life as an expletive-filled Xbox Live message. Some context: I'm playing Meet Your Maker, a post-apocalyptic, asymmetrical multiplayer FPS from Dead by Daylight developer Behaviour Interactive, in which you build trap-filled bases using materials either taken from other bases, or gathered from the cooling bodies of those who come to raid your own.

You're doing all this on behalf of a giant, frantic jellybaby in a Bacta tank, who shrieks at you constantly to gather genetic material or "genemat", that she may raise a new and superior civilisation from the sands. It's sort of Mad Max by way of Warhammer 40,000. But any and all plot shenanigans are soon forgotten in the face of the simmering, unspoken rivalries of the player community. Despite the title, you don't actually see opposing base-builders - or as they're here known, Custodians - in Meet Your Maker, but by golly do you come to know them from their works.

Meet Your Maker's base-building is as intuitive as the average base is nightmarish. You place unlockable, upgradeable blocks, ramps and hazards in first-person, reloading the map periodically to test the results out. While some map templates have certain criteria, such as a minimum number of AI guards, the only overarching requirement is that each base needs a clear, walkable path from the perimeter to the genemat extractor in the centre.

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