The Muller-Powell Principle teleports onto Windows PC

• Announcements by Jack Allin
• Published:

Playable prologue also available for Portal-styled sci-fi environmental physics puzzler on Steam

Usually the sight of a hi-tech gun in a game means it's a run 'n' gun shooter, but ever since Portal it's been wise to look a little closer to see just what it's firing. Or extracting, in the case of The Muller-Powell Principle, a newly released sci-fi environmental physics puzzler that's all about brains over bullets.

In the near future, players will step into the shoes of Harry Herman at a company called Delta Laboratories, which specializes in researching "interdimensional traveling." Your project was "supposed to benefit all humanity," but because of your failure, something has gone catastophically wrong. You soon find yourself in one of Delta's "off-world research facilities in an unknown dimension," desperate to find a way home. But to to that, and perhaps to "reveal the dark truth about Delta Labs and your involvement with them" in the process, you must travel "across space and time" though surreal worlds in parallel dimensions, solving a variety of physics-based puzzles along the way. Helping you remotely are your friends Alex and Eugene, but your best and closest ally is your trusty Portable Energy Manipulator. How you choose to approach the dilemmas you face will have genuine consequences, leading to one of multiple possible endings.

Presented in free-roaming first-person 3D, The Muller-Powell Principle has clearly been inspired by Portal and its ilk, but unlike the more sterile environments of Valve's classic, here you'll spend most of your time exploring "bizarre alien dimensions." Each character and location has their own background and lore to uncover through conversation, notes and other environmental cues, but you'll be mainly be focused on how to overcome the numerous obstacles in your path. You can interact with many objects as you would any game, but much of the heavy lifting will be done by the special tool you carry. The Portable Energy Manipulator can absorb the properties of many sources, including electricity, heat, and even radioactivity to be expelled in creative ways, as well as quantum entanglement energy that allows you to create gateways for traveling between worlds. Occasionally you'll encounter creatures that wish to harm you, but since you're not armed with a normal gun, you'll need to use yours to "outsmart or suspend them," such as distracting them with light or freezing them in place to aid in your escape.

If you're up for a little gun-toting space-time hopping, you can lock and load right away, as The Muller-Powell Principle is available now to download on Steam. If you'd like to dab a toe in interdimensional waters first, you can do that too via the game's playable foreword for Windows PC, providing a couple hours' worth of gameplay introducing "some of the game's mechanics, creatures, and ideas."

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