Meet Your Maker is an FPS post-apocalypse dungeon crawler/dungeon builder developed and published by Behaviour Interactive. The game was released for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S in April 2023.
In 2032, civilization crumbles to the Corrugenic Virus Pandemic, as the DNA of the life it infects is mutated beyond repair. Over centuries, the survivors coalesce into the dubious Salvation Council, a collection of clone Sanctuaries, and roaming tribes of techno-barbarians. As the human genome itself is dying out, technology veers sideways into madness. The raw processing power of every surviving supercomputer and the workforce of every cloned slave is tasked towards pure brutal survival, resulting in a hellish Low Culture, High Tech age. Cyborg battle thralls and sadistic traps litter the merciless fortresses of the wasteland, while complex miraculous nanotechnology is only used for the purpose of harvesting and hoarding genetic materials (commonly referred to as GenMat) by slaughtering people and exhuming mass graves for their tissue samples, which are then pumped into researchers turned test subjects.
But none of this matters to you, Custodian.
You awaken to Meet Your Maker, a Humanoid Abomination called the Chimera, clinging to the hope of consuming enough GenMat to evolve into a species that is both immune to the effects of the Corrugenic Virus and able to survive the horrors of the wasteland. You are not alone; thousands of other Custodians serve thousands of Chimera in thousands of Sanctuaries, and you're all competing for GenMat. Your duties are twofold: raid the deathtrap-infested Outposts overseeing the harvest of the corpse-rich mass graves known as Burial Sites to steal the concentrated GenMat stored in their cores, and build your own deathtrap-infested Outposts to farm GenMat from both the area and the invading raiders who will die in droves trying to steal from you.
Make no mistake: Half your job is to literally walk straight into deathtraps. You are going to die more times than in a soulslike. The other half, however, is building those deathtraps, laughing as you watch the replays of your rivals falling ever-more-comically into your increasingly sadistic creations. Maybe you can forget about the world ending, have fun as a post-apocalypse supervillain, and make your enemies meet their makers.
Meet Your Maker contains examples of:
- Acid Pool: You have Corrosive Cubes; toxic waste products are repurposed by suspending them in midair via plasma as traps. While they're cost effective and deadly to the undexterous, their core weakness is that a prepared player can dash through them. note
- Automatic Crossbow: Your Falconic Plasmabow is a semi-automatic that can hold fifteen shots and is considerably more accurate than the Volt Lancer. The drawback is that it can only kill guards, and only if it can hit an unarmored spot, so it's essential to surviving a Zerg Rush but not much else.
- Auto-Revive: The Phoenix Pod is a once-per-run consumable that will create a molecular reconstruction of you if you die. However, it can't clone spent ammo for some strange reason, and a deployed pod will be destroyed by the secondary security systems once you steal the GenMat vial. note
- BFS: The Sledgeblade is a magnetic broadsword which can break armor and lunge towards enemies.
- Booby Trap: Most traps in the game are solidly this.
- Clone Degeneration: The point of the Chimera Wars you're fighting. While cloning has been mastered, the clones are not fully immune to the Corrugenic Virus and will experience genetic damage over time, and the GenMat required to fix the damage or create new clones is a 'very' limited resource.
- Death Course: A classic strategy is to place a slew of traps and guards in a hallway or large area. This can get even worse if you use trap mods to hide the course until the GenMat is stolen while placing the course right next to the GenMat core, forcing the raider to either think fast or run faster before the traps start activating all at once.
- Death Trap: The Game.
- Deflector Shields: The Arc Barrier will make you immune to all damage from all sources at all angles. The only drawback is that it only lasts 1.5 seconds (2 seconds if you use a timed block) and requires another 8.5 seconds to recharge.note
- The Flash Barrier is a 2-charge consumable version of the Arc that lasts considerably longer in a single place. note
- Dungeon Maintenance: You must construct the dungeon from a bare-bones site. Nanotechnology and flash-cloning ensures your traps and guards will be restocked automatically. However, the purpose of your Outposts is to farm GenMat, meaning you need to use Synthite to excavate new layers of the burial site once the farmable layer of GenMat is exhausted. Promoting an outpost will increase its item cap, meaning you can improve upon your designs.
- Expendable Clone: You and your entire staff are clones.
- As a Custodian, a specialized combat / engineer clone, you are cloned every time you die. In general, your life usually takes less to clone than the concentrated GenMat you're trying to steal, so your Sanctuary treats whatever happens to your corpses as expendable.
- The Chimera and your advisors, however, are more precious clones, as the purpose of their endeavor is to evolve themselves into something not expendable.
- Your sub-clones are flash-cloned cyborg attack slaves, designed to be both cost-effective and generally mindless, and are the most expendable of all.
- Fantastic Firearms: The Volt Lancer is a gauss bolt rifle and the Falconic Plasmabow is a semi-automatic plasma-strung bolt pistol. Most of the world's gunpowder and gunpower ingredient stores have gone dry, and any explosion that doesn't use fantastic methods runs the risk of destroying the fragile GenMat, leading to an arms race of weird.
- Godzilla Threshold: Humanity is nearly extinct, and there's not enough uncorrupted genetic material to maintain the clones of all the Sanctuaries. The Sanctuaries resorted to increasingly vile experiments to save humanity, then turned on one another to hoard the last remaining scraps in the hopes that the strongest would develop the cure.
- Grappling-Hook Pistol: Your Fortralis suit comes equipped with a grappling hook with almost no cooldown. You're going to need it.
- The non-lethal Iron Claw trap will try to grab you so that it can pull you in range of more lethal traps.
- Grenade Spam: The Bomb Ejector unleashes multiple mines which will bounce around before exploding. Chaos Bombs in particular can easily chase a slow Raider.
- Kansas City Shuffle: Many successful trap combinations involve obscuring a trap in a place that is hard to locate yet easy to disarm, only to place a surprise trap combination wherever the raider is expected to move to destroy or evade said trap, catching them off guard while they're busy retrieving ammo from the destroyed trap.
- Lured into a Trap: The point of any superfluously well-designed area.
- Forsaken Tombs in particular are side objectives which raiders can find to gather Parts and Synthite. Many of them are armed to the teeth with traps to ruin greedy raiders.
- Magnetic Weapons: The Volt Lancer is a gauss bolt rifle which has enough power to destroy any trap, guard, or a layer of armor, but has a weak firing arc.
- Misapplied Phlebotinum: Synthite, a super-polymer which can be quickly constructed or reconstructed into any material, to the point that it can even be used to create a flawed clone of a mutant from a device the size of a fist. Sadly, it was created centuries too late; as the near-dead world depends primarily on genetic material to survive, synthite is wasted by the thousands of units for the sole purpose of gathering flimsy DNA.
- Parrying Bullets: You can deflect bolts with the Fury's Edge sword. While it's not as impressive as parrying bullets, the fact is that you can deflect an entire wall of bolts with one swing.
- Powered Armor: Downplayed. Your Fortralis 'armor' can't survive anything more than half a second of elemental damage; every direct attack in the game will kill a custodian instantly. However, the suit makes up for its poor defense with hydraulic-powered movement systems, redundant danger sensors, and a powerful energy module that boosts the abilities of your weapons. In terms of defense, the Arc Barrier wouldn't work without a Fortralis suit.
- Rain of Arrows: The Boltshot unleashes a small spread of bolts. For extra gravitas, you can line a whole wall with them.
- Schizo Tech: Most of the world's guns have been replaced with bolt shooters like gauss rifles and crossbows, most explosives use electrical flux rather than chemical ignition, and many of the traps look like they belong in a Mad Max movie while also using futuristic molecular reconstruction technology. Justified by the apocalypse destroying all industry but not erasing supercomputers; all that processing power is geared towards creating technology whose sole purpose is the collection and preservation of GenMat, which has technical challenges that prioritize fragile genome samples over human safety.
- Spider-Sense: The Custodians' Fortralis suits have redundant danger sensors, giving you a visual heads-up as to the direction of any trap or enemy that's about to fire. Just be careful not to get swamped with warnings...
- Spikes of Doom: The Impaler is a retracting spike wall that shoots out after detecting an enemy.
- Squashed Flat: The Death Piston periodically shoots its hammer outward, killing anything it can crush flat. While this trap is the easiest to spot, it can act as a barrier to prevent a speedster from rushing through, or as a shield to protect long-range traps.
- Stuff Blowing Up: You can carry up to three hand grenades, or use an Outpost's Bomb Ejector against its own allied guards and traps.
- Survival Horror: You can theme your Outpost to be like this, thanks to a combination of claustrophobic design options and some decorations from Behaviour Interactive's other game Dead by Daylight. In particular, you can set up traps so that retrieving already limited ammo is really complicated.
- Trapdoor: One of the few 'non-lethal' traps is the Holocube, a block that looks like bedrock until you get close or shoot it, self-destructing entirely. You can use this to trick a raider into walking on what they think is solid bedrock and then fall into whatever you have prepared. For extra paranoia, you can mod it so that it doesn't reveal itself until you've stolen the GenMat; even if you shoot it and step on it on the way in, it won't reveal itself or let anything pass through it until you're trying to escape.
- Unobtainium: GenMat is everything to the Sanctuaries. The Corrugenic Virus is slowly breaking down everything biological everywhere on the planet, so new samples of human DNA are required to repair the damage, while also improving the stats of the team. The Sanctuaries' hope is that enough GenMat consumption will one day create a being who is immune to the Corrugenic Virus. With the population of humanity at the brink and most mass graves exhumed, the Sanctuaries have turned to competing against each other for the scraps.
- Weak Turret Gun: The Plasma Sentinel is an actual turret that shoots plasma balls. The catch is that it's the size of a whole block and any hit on it, even on the wireframe, will cause it to short out.
- Video Game Flamethrowers Suck: Averted with the Incinerator trap, which has a long range and can shoot through other traps without harming them. It takes timing and good aim to shoot an Incinerator through a barrage of Death Pistons, before the flames can reach you no less.
- You Will Not Evade Me: Some traps, such as a modded Boltshot and the Hornet's plasma bolts, have the ability to home in on their target.note
