With an official release date confirmed at The Game Awards 2022, Meet Your Maker looks poised to be a new fan-favorite for sadistic Super Mario Maker players who enjoy creating near-impossible, hard-to-beat gauntlets. When Behaviour Interactive announced Meet Your Maker, it introduced audiences to a game that blended together a survivalist base-building format with the fun of PvP raids, all decked out in a gritty dieselpunk style. Since it gives players the freedom to build and fortify their own outposts in-game, the best defensive strategy will undoubtedly require players to be the cruelest.
Comparisons to the family-friendly fun of Super Mario seem bizarre, but Super Mario Maker helped adjust the scope of level designs through player-made content. Giving players creative freedom for level designs lead to a range of different personalities inevitably shining through, such as those who create "auto levels" that can be beaten without moving or others who recreate entire games like a Super Mario Maker 2 version of Duck Hunt. Among these styles are players who enjoy creating challenging levels to see people suffer when trying to beat them, which could be the exact crowd Meet Your Maker is targeting.
Meet Your Maker's Difficulty
Though several games exist that allow people to build their own bases and defend it from others, such as Rust or Ark: Survival Evolved and its upcoming sequel, it is not usually the sole focus of these experiences. Meet Your Maker places its base-building and strategy defense as a central tenet of its gameplay, allowing players to challenge themselves by raiding others' outposts. Not only can players build their outposts however they'd like, they can simultaneously attempt to attack other outposts and earn rewards for successfully doing either.
Meet Your Maker's format hinges on prioritizing player ingenuity and FromSoft levels of difficulty. As players can be killed in one hit, raids often consist of multiple attempts that require trial and error, adapting to traps and enemies while gathering rewards such as building blocks or genetic material. Outposts need to be rigorously defended, using strategically placed and modified traps, guards, or block types. In order to do well in the game, players will need to quickly overcome these challenges in spite of frustrating setbacks from failed raids.
Meet Your Maker Meets Super Mario Maker
As mentioned, Meet Your Maker is a far cry from the likes of Super Mario Maker, but parallels are there. Meet Your Maker's one-hit knockout format can be equated to player-made levels in Super Mario Maker that don't provide power-ups like mushrooms or fire flowers as a buffer, forcing Mario to complete the level taking no damage. The range of blocks, enemies, and more in both Super Mario Maker games can lead to level designs become intensely strategic, exploiting things like P switches or Yoshi jumps, and this reflects the same level of strategy that Meet Your Maker might necessitate.
Beyond these parallels, the core ethos of players that Meet Your Maker is appealing to can be seen among the same Super Mario Maker players who design levels that are intentionally difficult, some that can take upwards of eight hours to beat in Super Mario Maker 2. While these were typically just a subsection of Super Mario Maker alongside both traditional and non-traditional level layouts, Meet Your Maker is proposing to take this approach from niche to necessary. By channeling the cruelest level designs from Super Mario Maker, players could thrive in Meet Your Maker's post-apocalyptic PvP world.
Meet Your Maker is set to release on April 4, 2023, for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
