Media Molecule is hoping that the game’s pre-made levels will play the part of tutor when it comes to the more complicated tools. In this way, LBP is a puzzle game: much of the fun is reverse-engineering what the designers have done. “In making the levels, Mark had one rule: we can’t cheat,” explains Ettouney. “We had to use the same tools to create the levels that players would.” In other words, look carefully enough at something the team has built, and you’ll soon know how to do it yourself – and from wooden cars with working engines to a giant Doctor Martens boot that descends on chains, the team has built just about everything. “We kept saying: ‘Can we cheat just this once?’” continues Ettouney. “Mark never caved in. It eventually led to the tools becoming a lot more powerful.”

It’s hard to think of a game with a simpler, yet more ambitious, remit. Because of that, a question has always remained: will this kind of freedom prove paralyzingly intimidating when the player sits down in front of their TV?


“To me this is far less intimidating than MySpace,” says Healey (pictured), and adds that extensive play testing has yet to see anyone freeze with panic. “You don’t need to be a decorator to make your room look nice,” adds Ettouney. “This is the same kind of thing. We’ve given it a handmade look to celebrate imperfection. We hope people will feel comfortable.”

LBP is broken into three discrete modes: Play, Create and Share. Initially, you’ll have to unlock Create by playing through the first few pre-made levels of Play (there are 50 in total). Sackboy and Popit are the lynchpins that tie everything together, both modes using them as the means of interaction, with Create allowing him to switch between flying about the level to place items and dropping back down to the ground to test them. (Share handles precisely what you’d expect.)

Hands-on, Create is not a million miles away from a simple art package. We start by selecting a material and brush shape from Popit, and are soon drawing a thick swathe of shiny metal plating on to the environment. Using the right stick, we alter the size of the brush as we go, and then break this into chunks with judicious stabs of the eraser. When we switch to test mode, our strange metal landscape falls to the floor, rocked back and forth by the physics engine, before coming to rest (you can use ‘dark matter’ to glue blocks in the air, but the designers rarely do).

We’re left with a pile of chunky rubble, but within seconds we’re tugging it about to form a promising assault course, and Healey is already showing us how to build working motors from a few metal blocks and a cog, while technical director Alex Evans stops by to offer instruction on the serious business of adding belch effects to stone lumps to make granite whoopee cushions. Even without this top-quality help, we’re quickly finding things we want to do, just by pulling objects from Popit and trying them out.

The results are hardly Yoshi’s Island, but within five minutes we’ve turned a blank canvas into a playground we could happily mess about in for hours, tweaking platforms and playing with the physics properties of different materials. And we’ve done it all without thinking – the design emerging from the ease with which we moved between building and testing.