If you’ve been playing a lot of The Legend of Zelda recently, Blueprint 3D is probably going to give you a slight sense of déjà vu – and the reason for that is all to do with keys.
One of the many delightful asides in Skyward Sword comes in the form of the game’s boss keys – keys that, in previous Zeldas, have merely been pleasantly chunky and ornate. In the latest adventure, they’ve been transformed into little knots of twisted sculpture, however, and your job is to rotate them, using the Wii remote, in order to get them to fit into each dungeon’s final door. It’s a tiny part of the overall experience - and it hardly ever presents very much of a challenge - but it’s warmly rewarding all the same: a nice little victory before you’re off to face a boss, who may well flatten you on your first encounter.
Blueprint 3D hinges on a very similar idea. You’re presented with a series of disjointed schematics, and it’s up to you to turn them around until you’ve put the original design back together. A friend sent me a link to the game a few weeks’ back, and I’ve only just gotten round to playing it. As it’s almost exactly the same mechanic as the Zelda boss key mini-game (it’s also the same as Blueprint 3D designer Konstantin Stankevich’s previous title, Starlight, incidentally), I was pretty confident I’d be done with it in minutes. How hard can this be? I asked myself. Really hard, is the surprising answer.
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And that’s because Stankevich’s game doesn’t just take its blueprints apart, it absolutely shatters them, flinging each shard onto its own plane, tilting some elements forwards and bending some backwards. The game begins fairly gently, but by the time you’re tackling the harder challenges, you may have a difficult time telling what you’re even meant to be piecing together, let alone working out how to rotate the whole thing into place.
It’s playful, satisfying stuff, and the thing I find particularly interesting about it is that the satisfaction tends not to come when you finally snap the pieces together and the game heads into victory mode, but when you first come to notice what the subject of the blueprint might actually be. The moment before you’ve put the thing back in place when you realise: a wheel, tail-lights, cab - this is going to be a truck!
After that, it’s a question of fine-tuning, making sure the elements are basically oriented correctly, and then feeling around for exactly the right positioning. With a click, it’s done, and then you’re off to the next challenge, but with another little piece of the world restored to quiet order. A feeling, coincidentally, that should be familiar to anyone who’s ever played a Zelda game.