Teardown and the joy of being not so much a cat burglar, more a rhino burglar
Chris: Teardown is a game about knocking holes in stuff. Walls. Ceilings. Bits of pier. And while you can knock some holes in stuff with a hammer, often you’re going to need something bigger: a forklift, or a JCB, or a yacht.
Teardown previewPublisher/Developer: Tuxedo LabsAvailability: Played on PC and only available on PC, via Steam Early Access, for £18.79
It’s magical, actually: a voxely world that’s just ready to crumble if you find the right way to approach things. You play as a thief of sorts, and each mission drops you into a sandbox with a simple sort of objective – get this, destroy that. You have as long as you want to scope things out and plan how you’re going to tackle things, and then you’re off.
The magic may be in how things come down – the way a wall collapses as you ease a dumptruck through it, or even the way a window splinters into tinkling pieces after a blow from your hammer – but what keeps me playing is a totally unexpected rigour to the whole thing.
After a few opening missions alarms come into play: alarms are triggered after you start ticking off your objectives and they give you a certain amount of time to do what you’ve got to do and escape before it’s an instant game over. This means that a game that’s initially about busting stuff up with no thought for tomorrow is actually a game about altering the environment to create the clearest route between a handful of scattered points.
I love this because it invokes one of my favourite books of the last few years, A Burglar’s Guide to the City, by the Bldgblog editor Geoff Manaugh. This is one of those books that I have to keep rebuying because I keep giving copies away. I’ve written about this book before I think, but Manaugh’s central point is that burglars are sort of super-users of the urban environment. They see possibilities where other people just see a wall or a window or a JCB. They aren’t constrained by the things the rest of us are constrained by, and yet they still have that rigour as they go about their objectives. Very Teardown.
