In Meet Your Maker, Players Break Into Your Outposts While You Sleep

Meet Your Maker isn’t what I envisioned Behaviour Interactive’s next game would be after Dead by Daylight, and I’m not complaining. Set in a post-apocalyptic future where the world’s been ravaged by disease and war, we’re playing the Custodian, one of humanity’s last survivors. Our goal? Searching outposts for pure genetic material called Genmat to revitalise humanity.

It’s a straightforward premise and not the most intriguing setting, admittedly. Sci-fi isn’t exactly lacking barren wastelands, but that’s OK. Meet Your Maker’s real spark comes from its players. Sitting down for a hands-off preview at Gamescom 2022, Meet Your Maker is a game of two halves. There’s something for both the creative-types and FPS fans that just wanna shoot stuff, and you can switch between these roles.

On the creative side, you’ll build your own outposts, share them online, and watch other players raid them. On the other, we are the raiders, tackling outposts alone or with a friend in two-player co-op. It’s reminiscent of Ubisoft’s long-defunct The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot, so picture that premise but replace the colourful fantasy action-RPG with a bleak FPS.

Armed with different ranged and melee weapons, raiders are accompanied by a robotic Harvester but take care with your attacks. Should they die, you’ll lose precious Genmat and in these austere times, wasted materials is something we can’t afford. Raiding outposts sounds simple enough but depending on the other side’s creativity, that’s usually much easier said than done. Each base is teaming with traps, swapping between spiked walls, guard robots, and plenty more. 

You’ll probably die a lot at the beginning. Successful raids require never dropping your guard, taking the time to look around each corner and across ceilings for traps. Think you can just walk out once you’ve obtained the Genmat and cleared the traps? Think again. Builders can set a second wave of traps that activate after claiming it, which makes leaving an unexpected challenge. Oh, and did I mention Meet Your Maker’s one-hit kill system and lack of checkpoints? Yeah… death means completely resetting your progress, so there’s no room for error.

While I couldn’t directly test these levels for myself, I’m intrigued by the outpost system’s creativity. Because Meet Your Maker’s currently hosting a closed playtest, Behaviour’s staff had a good range of levels to pick between, taking several tries to clear some. I can already feel that sense of reward from completing a raid, knowing you’ve navigated deadly traps and unnerving taps without taking a single hit. If you’re particularly taken with an outpost’s design, raiders can award the builder accolades once beaten, basing these on whether it was fun, brutal, ingenious, and more. 

To keep outposts interesting, Meet Your Maker provides various options with base planning. Alongside different block and trap types, you can also determine guard placements and their patrols paths, alongside which route the Harvester will follow. That is, within reason, every resource has a cost and funds are limited, so you can’t keep building away like it's Minecraft. Frivolous project management has no place here when creating outposts of doom, so consider your strategy carefully. There’s a robust tool set and Behaviour tells me level creation shouldn’t take long, advising a standard sized map will need around an hour to complete.

Once an outpost’s live, you can’t directly interfere with a raider’s run. Even as you sleep, your beloved base could be targeted, it’s unseemly. Instead, Meet Your Maker lets creators analyse attempted runs from a third-person perspective. Full replays of raiders taking on your outpost are provided, pinpointing how many times they failed, where they died, and how they eventually succeeded. Better still, when editing maps, death locations are clearly marked, indicating what’s been effective. For anyone looking to up their game, this provides valuable insights.

I wish I could’ve gone hands-on with Meet Your Maker but right now, I’m curious by what I’ve seen. Custom level designers can give games that longevity way beyond its natural cycle, we’ve seen it before with Doom, Super Mario Maker and LittleBigPlanet, and I can picture Behaviour’s latest taking its place alongside them. You can only judge so much without playing directly, so we'll see how this goes.