Puzzle game demo from Pillow Castle thinks bigger than portals

A tech demo called Museum of Simulation Technology from Pillow Castle, a small student team at Carnegie Mellon University's Entertainment Technology Center, shows off a first-person puzzle game that uses forced perspective to great effect.

"If you've ever tried to squish the moon between your thumb and forefinger or seen a photo of some giant person holding up the Leaning Tower of Pisa, you've had experience with forced perspective illusions," Pillow Castle explained.

The short video posted to YouTube shows how you can grab objects in the distance that seem small to actually shrink them, or get up close to a small object and click on it to make it huge. After demonstrating this basic idea, the video shows a number of ways it can be used to solve puzzles, enlarging or shrinking items to traverse the environment.

It's an interesting idea and it gets even more intriguing towards the end of the video, when it's combined with portals, allowing you to shrink and enlarge yourself.

Pillow Castle said that it's already hard at work on a full version of the game that will include a story, and that the video represents a very early build. Early as it may be, the video also represents the same entry which earned the team the Audience Award and Best Technological Game Award at the Sense of Wonder Night event in the Tokyo Game Show.

Pillow Castle isn't ready to talk about a release date, but If you're interested in the forced perspective concept, Perspective (an IGF 2013 finalist and Technical Excellence Award winner) and Tale of Scale (which was made for Ludum Dare 25) are similar.