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The aroma's the thing that hits you first. I don't know if I've ever noticed the odour of other development studios, but I guess they've all kind of smelt the same; office blocks where new carpet and stale coffee mix together, an occasional hint of warm plastic seeping through. State of Play's studio is different: it's sawdust and craft glue, the pleasantly acrid tang of freshly cut wood. The world it's crafting isn't locked up on hard drives, floating on computer screens. It's sitting in the corner, complete in miniature, begging to be touched. That's because State of Play makes its worlds not out of polygons and shaders but from cardboard and wood, slotting them all together and recording them via camera for players to explore. They're real, tangible places you can poke around; imagine holding Hyrule in your hands, seeing its fields and towns laid out like a model village, or being able to run your fingers across the contours of Mario Bros' 1-1. It's a remarkable aesthetic, seen first in Lume and, later this year, to be fully expanded upon in Lumino City.
Lumino City's an adventure game in which you play a young girl in search of her grandfather, a quest that takes you to the furthest reaches of this papercraft metropolis. The puzzles are as light as the adventure, though they've often a tactile, analogue edge in keeping with the tangible world: reel to reel tapes must be threaded in order, light boxes blended to create new colours and, in one brilliant scene, a Kowloon City-inspired building block is tugged at and manipulated in order to open up an entirely new path.
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