Hi everyone, it's great to be back as it’s been a few years since we shared Maquette with you. While that game was about the shifting scale of perspective and memories, we’ve spent our time since then thinking about a different kind of shift: the shift of unparallel realities.
Last week, we were excited to give you a first glimpse of what we’ve been building. This is Uncanyon:
A new take on classic adventures
Uncanyon is a puzzle-first adventure set in a forgotten world that emerged and once flourished in the folds of converging unparallel universes. You play as Sonia, a stranger to this land. As she explores, she’ll start piecing together not just how to survive Uncanyon, but why it needs her (whether she’s ready for that role or not).
While Sonia is trying to save the world in classic adventure tradition, her story is also a personal one. Although she arrived in Uncanyon looking for excitement, as Sonia becomes aware of her fate and her role, the weight of being a hero expected to save the world starts to weigh heavily on her.
For that, our team looked to our own lives, drawing from the pressure of family expectations and the invisible obligations social media places on so many of us. She’s someone handling these pressures in real time, the same way we all are, and that shared uncertainty is something we leaned into throughout the writing and world design.
Unveil puzzle-filled ruins
In Maquette’s recursive world, we found a soft spot for spaces that reward close observation. Uncanyon’s temples and ruins carry that forward, but with sharper teeth. These places were built to keep people out – filled with traps, locks, and puzzles designed by whoever came before to guard what’s inside.
You’ll work through them using tools and discoveries you pick up along the way, building up a small but versatile kit of solutions as you go. We wanted to take classic “dungeon puzzles” and elevate them from softball distractions to intricate, mechanical traps and vaults with lots of “aha” moments to be found. Part of the fun for us has been designing spaces where the solution only clicks once you’ve truly uncovered new aspects of the puzzle systems.
Reality Fragments
This is the part of Uncanyon we’re most excited to talk about.
Scattered throughout the world are devices powered by fragmentstone, a mysterious substance that allows you to shift and bend alternate realities in and out of Uncanyon. Activate one of these devices, and the space you’re standing in transforms: obstacles move, hazards disappear, paths that didn’t exist a moment ago suddenly do. Whole rooms seamlessly morph from one reality to another around you.
In other fiction, alternate universes are separate, and the characters move between them. But here, the realities converge in Uncanyon – and you’re in control. This means you can blend realities in and out as you wish. You can freeze blending at any time to explore the mixture of realities you’ve just created, and there are even points where you can be in multiple realities at the same time!
A blocked doorway in one reality might be wide open in another, at the cost of a hazard you now must account for elsewhere. Learning to explore an area across its different states and figuring out which reality to be in and when, is the core puzzle language players will learn over the course of the game.
What’s next
We’ve got more to share about Sonia’s story, the regions you’ll explore, and how Reality Fragments evolve the world as you progress — but we wanted this first peek at the game to give you the core ideas at the heart of the game: a puzzle-first adventure set in a fantastic land of unparallel realities.
Thank you for following us from Maquette to here. We can’t wait to see what you find in Uncanyon, which will be launching in 2027.