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What’s in the box? Schrodinger’s Cat and a randomly generating platformer

Schrodingers Cat and Raiders of the Lost Quark Italic Pig Team17

Back in 1935 Erwin Schrodinger killed a hypothesis kitty. He said that if you put a cat in a box with a jar of poison and close the lid that we cannot tell whether it is dead or alive until we open the lid to observe it, so, in that moment, when we can’t tell, it is both alive and dead. (He was using this example to point out the silliness of the binary state but that bit’s often forgotten.)

However, he didn’t tell us about the everything else in there, like the Particle Zoo, the collectible quarks, or the randomly generating platformer. Luckily, Italic Pig are doing that for us.

Schrodinger’s Cat and the Raiders of the Lost Quark puts you in the booties of the titular cat and leaves you to explore the world held in the box, the quantum polyverse.

Italis say that Schrodinger’s Cat “blazes irreverently through the wild wonders of the Standard Model, combining lateral-thinking multi-solution logic puzzles with Fists-of-Feynman kickass combat action.”

The centre of the story concerns the particle zoo – a place where folk can go to observe the elementary particles of the standard model in their natural environment. Something’s gone wrong and all the anthropomorphised particles have escaped and it’s on you to return them to their enclosures.

As well as your feline agility and fighting moves you have the power to combine quarks to create power ups. Quarks, the matter that makes up protons and neutrons (which in turn make up atoms {which in turn makes up the universe}}, appear in Schrodinger’s Cat as colourful collectible objects. You can combine three of them to make special one-use abilities. There are six quarks to work with, the first four a common and are essentially an up, down, left, and right. Combine three downs to make a drill that lets you mine through barriers. Two ups and a down combine to make a missile.

In this way you can make “bridges, ladders, shields, grenades, etc to combat and subdue the quarkivorous leptons, kleptomaniacal gluons and cantankerous bosons now running amok.”

While none of the these ideas are new they’re presented in a way I want to explore. Seeing the particles of the Standard Model as zoo animals is the sort of thing that makes me want to spend an afternoon with a game.

Shrodinger’s Cat is due out later this year.

Update: Thanks to Riller for pointing out Schrodinger was arguing against the idea of something being in two states, not for it.