Pillow Castle gives Portal a run for its money with its experimental puzzle demo

Pittsburgh-based indie group Pillow Castle Games has released its demo for an upcoming first-person puzzle game inspired by an optical illusion known as forced perspective, a camera trick that merges background images into the foreground.

In the demo, the player can click on seemingly large objects that form the backdrop of the game and move them into the foreground where they retain their shape but appear drastically smaller in size the nearer they are. Once dropped in a new place, the object will adapt in size and distance according to your perspective.

Objects can also cause certain effects on the world. For example, the demo shows by grabbing an electric fan, distancing yourself from it to change its perspective size and dropping it in front of an unreachable exit, it is possible to blow the doorway exit to a place possible to get to.

"'The Museum of Simulation Technology' is our playground we're using to wrangle our brains around using your perception as a weapon. Think of it as a 'proof of concept,'" reads a post from the studio.

Pillow Castle is made up of a group of students from Carnegie Mellon University's Entertainment Technology Center. You can take a look at the demo in full above this post, which features unedited gameplay.