Alan Hazelden's curatorial eye and the sudoku-metroidvania crossover — design vocabulary in motion

Making "the spookiness of quantum mechanics" into a puzzle you can play without a PhD: the Schrödinger's Cat Burglar developer interview

One piece today. I read, in the original English, an interview the edited puzzle outlet Thinky Games ran with Martin Binfield, lead developer at the Brisbane (Australia) studio Abandoned Sheep (Devin Stone, June 9, 2026). His game, Schrödinger's Cat Burglar, turns the uncertainty principle straight into an input: you can be in two places at once, and if you're observed in one, you cease to exist in the other — a cat-led burglary puzzle built on that. What interests me as design is the concrete testimony of how the team dragged this baffling premise down to "playable without a PhD": they fought on three fronts — readability (the camera), invisible input assistance (jumping), and Portal-derived onboarding structure. The piece is about five weeks old, but it is worth digging into as a practical case of how you get a hard core mechanic to land. I state its date explicitly.