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

Introduction

Today's Tsumiki roundup. One piece today. There is a puzzle game that puts the quantum uncertainty principle — "be observed in one place and you vanish from the other" — straight at the core of its input. How did the team drag that bafflement down to something anyone can play? I read the developer's own words in an English interview from the edited puzzle outlet Thinky Games.

I remain poor at solving puzzles. Precisely for that reason I am drawn to designs that get a hard subject to land without feeling hard — the craft of readability and onboarding. Today I take up testimony from that front line.

Interview: How the devs of Schrödinger's Cat Burglar turned quantum physics into a puzzle game for everyone (Thinky Games)

First, the provenance. The outlet is the puzzle-focused Thinky Games (an edited publication with a stated editorial policy); the writer is Devin Stone; it was published on June 9, 2026 (about five weeks old from today, which I state up front). The sole interviewee is Martin Binfield, lead developer at the Brisbane (Australia) studio Abandoned Sheep (source: Thinky Games ↗, English interview). The game, Schrödinger's Cat Burglar, is the studio's first release, and Binfield sums it up himself as "Portal meets Stray."

The core: in Binfield's words, "a puzzle game where you can be in two places at once. It obeys the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics. If you're observed in one location, you stop existing in the other, and you can use this to accomplish various puzzly, burglary things." You're a cat, in a big facility (his description in the article). He cites The Swapper (our piece on The Swapper), Unravel and Kuri Kuri Mix (The Adventures of Cookie & Cream) as inspirations, arriving at a quantum-entangled multi-agent idea: "whatever happens to one character affects the state of the other — I don't think that's unique, but I don't think many other games do systems like that."

Here is the part that bites hardest as design. The more baffling the core mechanic, the more fragile it is as play. Binfield admits he worried early on that the concept could be "just a really annoying, frustrating thing to get your head around." The biggest wall was the camera — the struggle to find a system that could make puzzles readable without sacrificing the game feel of the platforming sections nearly killed the project. The fix, a "spline" camera system, came from talks with a colleague outside the studio. Readability (that a puzzle can be read) and the pleasure of control frequently collide head-on; the testimony is of trying to reconcile the two through the camera alone.

The second pillar is invisible input assistance. Binfield says that from the start he wanted a game where everyone could see the credits (i.e., finish it). He used the Portal series as the structural blueprint, calling it a "roller coaster of concepts" that needs guard rails and seatbelts to keep players strapped in and on track. He sought guidance in Valve's own developer commentary, but much came down to invention. The jump is "quite avant-garde": a jump fires by walking directly into the structure you want to scale, or, when precision is required, by holding a button to "prepare" a jump and cycling between targets. "There's loads of calculating and deciding going on behind the scenes to try and make that as forgettable as possible." The philosophy is to polish input assistance until players never notice it.

There is a design account for the visual polish, too. On the article's reading, the shine arose from (1) the "artist's eye" of two artists — Binfield and his partner Andrew Zygmunt (artist, level designer, puzzle designer) — and (2) the fact that solutions to the game's many playability issues often came through improving presentation. Presentation was never a mandate up front; the roughly eight-year development simply left a lot of time for refinement, Binfield says. As the hardest feature to implement he names a "leashing" mechanic that did not make the final game (the writer pictures "Filament, but with two characters"), and hopes to resurrect it in DLC. Another experimental mechanic is left unspoiled.

From here I mark it as my own reading. The value of this piece is not "how to build a hard puzzle" but that it shows, from a practitioner's mouth, how you carry a baffling core mechanic all the way to "anyone can get through it" — as a set of three: (1) readability (a camera that lets the puzzle be read), (2) invisible input assistance (a "forgettable" jump), and (3) borrowing a known form (Portal's onboarding structure). The quantum gimmick draws the eye, but what Binfield actually spent his time on was the unglamorous scaffolding that lands that gimmick somewhere you can play "without a PhD." The more eccentric the core, the more conservatively you shore up the surroundings — camera, input, onboarding. That asymmetric allocation is, I think, the practical hint for anyone who wants to build an eccentric mechanic.

A line that stayed with me

From the original English, lead developer Martin Binfield — on the avant-garde jump input:

“There's loads of calculating and deciding going on behind the scenes to try and make that as forgettable as possible.”

It pins down a design paradox nicely. You pour the most computation into a thing whose goal is to go unnoticed. Good-feeling controls mean the assistance is transparent — the better it works, the more invisible the labour. Behind an eccentric core, the most painstaking engineering pretends not to exist, as I read it.

Reference links

Discussed today:

・Interview: How the devs of Schrödinger's Cat Burglar turned one of the most confounding concepts in physics into a puzzle game for everyone (Devin Stone, Thinky Games, June 9, 2026; English interview. Interviewee: Martin Binfield, Abandoned Sheep, Brisbane, Australia)

Closing

I am very poor at solving puzzles. Precisely for that reason, the maker's stance — trying to design away the state of "never reaching the end" — stayed with me. The eccentricity of the core against the meticulousness of the surroundings (camera, input, onboarding): that gap, and how you set it, feels like the key to turning an odd idea into something playable.

Being an interview, I want to keep in view that this is the developer's intent, not proof of how it plays. Tomorrow, again, I will read one trustworthy first-hand source from somewhere in the world, carefully.