At This Point, You’d Think He’d Just Install an Escalator
The Godkiller – Chapter 1 is a top-down puzzle game developed by Seespace labs with a focus on verticality. Its block dropping and stacking mechanics that forced its designer to think about height very carefully, and in that thinking, Erik Hermansen realized that his game might just have more stairs than any other game in existence.
Now, there’s some disclaimers we’d have to go over before taking a statement like that seriously. Obviously games with player-created, procedural, or randomly-generated content are going to beat out Godkiller – there’s no chance of the game beating something like Manifold Garden. But if we’re only counting stairs that were intentionally designed and placed before the release of the game, Erik might actually have a point.
The grand total of steps in Godkiller comes out to 5,164 (I’m not sure I want to know how that number got so exact, but by god I hope some math shortcuts were involved), which gives the stairs a total height of 1.3 kilometers. For reference: given the story height for a building, Godkiller would be over 300 stories tall. The world’s tallest building, the Burj Kalifa, is a bit over 800 meters tall, and consists of 163 stories. Godkiller is very tall, and with stats like that I’m not sure I can think of a game that beats it.
But Erik’s talk about stairs didn’t end at bragging rights, there’s some insightful stuff about level design in there too. For starters, he discussed how much more he preferred stairs to other forms of vertical movement: “As a level designer, I have to do more planning about the space stairs will occupy. And they’ll push orderly layouts into more interesting patterns.”
The Godkiller – Chapter 1 has a Steam demo available now, and is set to release early next year. The game will see the players not just climbing stairs, but descending them too – perhaps multiple times, while they try to think their way through the game’s puzzles. So if you’ve been craving some extended stair-climbing with your video games, this might just be what you’ve been waiting for!