Coming to you from the floor of PAX AUS 2025, where the buzz of indie booths and the hum of excited players never really stops. This is the fourth entry in my “Meet the Designer” series (If you missed parts one, two and three), and today we’re diving into one of the quirkiest, most mind-bending puzzle games on the floor: Schrodinger’s Cat Burglar.
“Yeah, that’s right,” laughs Ben as we approach the booth. “Nice to meet you,” says Martin Binfield, director at Abandoned Sheep. He’s here showing off their latest creation, a puzzle adventure game where you play a cat who can be in two places at once. It’s clever, chaotic, and surprisingly elegant, blending stealth mechanics with quantum weirdness in a way that feels fresh and playful.
We talk about the origins of the idea, the challenges of designing puzzles around duality, and what it means to build a game that’s both brainy and absurd. Martin lets us peek behind the curtain of Abandoned Sheep’s creative process, and it’s clear this isn’t just a gimmick—it’s a love letter to logic, cats, and the joy of bending reality.
Ben: So is Schrodinger’s Cat Burglar a single player or 2-player?
We support both. Basically, what you’re playing in single player, you use two sticks on the controller, one for each cap. And then in cooperative mode, you can have two players on their own pads. And in Co-op, we had this thing where it’s called the request system, so you can use the right stick to kind of make an arrow come out of your friend to tell them where you want them to go.
It’s a bit like co-piloting.
Obviously, the puzzles are all set up for needing, you know, one person over here and one person over there.
It’s kind of funny because a single player kind of works well for having timing and choreography. At times, you’ve got things where you have to press two buttons at the same time. In single player, it’s just pressing two triggers at the same time. In two players, it’s about getting your timing right between you.
However, having two brains means it makes the puzzle easier, and things go so much quicker.
It’s kind of like, it’s adaptive difficulty without us having changed anything in the game.
I can’t think of the name of the game with the little wool people.
Yes, that’s Unravelled Two.
Thanks, yes! I played that with my kids, and that was fun, with them having to follow me. I had a lot of “now you need to jump up there because I need to come around this way…” In that the characters are tethered together. In Cat Burglar, it looks like each ‘cat’ is independent.
We have the same thing they have, which is that one person can jump into the other. Once you’re two cats, you can fuse them together into one cat.
Does that then mean you can get through some puzzles as one cat rather than two?
It’s like we have a gate mechanic called Heisenberg Energy, which is basically a pause; uncertainty is the excuse we came up with, which means that you can’t be in two places and go through it.
That is a great way to encourage and ensure players team up rather than play through as two cats.
I really like playing Unravel. It was a huge inspiration because I played it after starting working on this. Unravel alongside Portal and the Swap Bird. These are some of the pointer inspirations for the game.
That’s the beauty, this is your take on it, and it’s not the same because you’re not tethered. It’s not the same mechanic. I can see in the gameplay, it’s like in an urban or in a building setting.
Essentially, you start the game and you’re just a normal cat, and well, you’re a cat burglar who just kind of grey hat hacking to uncover culprit malfeasance. You go and hack a school facility above ground, very unassuming, something weird happens ther,e and you find yourself in this massive underground facility. Everything you see here is like deep in a cavernous place.
So you’ll go from these testing environments into offices and maintenance sectors of exposed rock. It’s like a big adventure underground.
You work your way through this big facility, and you find different areas. We’ve got a main elevator system that lets you get back to previous elevators and do it back and forth.
Is it one of those sort of puzzle games where you might go somewhere to find something that might allow you to unlock that other room that I couldn’t get into back on a previous level.
We actually have like a few levels in the middle of the game, which are based around the hub system. You kind of start in a central level and you go off somewhere else. Then when you come back, you’ve got like a new password, you can learn a lot more areas of that hub system. So all that sort of stuff comes into play.
That’s great! And is Schrodinger’s Cat Burglar on steam? Are we released yet?
We’re on steam. We have a demo up right now that people can play. We are aiming for release next year, and hopefully earlier rather than later, we’ll have nothing to announce. We would love to be on consoles. That’s something we will look at once we are out on Steam.
I’ll look it up on the demo and see. The graphics are quite clean. It’s not overly complicated when you’re playing. It’s difficult but not too difficult.
We tried to make it so that there’s no bits where you have to move both cats at once. You can move one and then move the other; there’s no skill barrier for dexterity. We tried to make it about thinking to solve the puzzles.is all we’re paying for.
Kelly joined in on the interview, as she walked past: When I was having a go, I could easily figure out jump. It’s like it tells you, but then it’s not just instant. You still have to actually pay attention. It was quite clever
Also, if you hold the jump button to get the crouch and the cat will wiggle its bum. It’s satisfying to see.
Kelly: The biting of the mouth to open things blew me away. It felt so real
Yeah. Absolutely, we tried to make it fun.
Ben: Thank you so much for your time. I’m keen to try it out myself.
Thank you.
Description:
Schrodinger’s Cat Burglar is a puzzle heist adventure with a quantum flavour. The player controls Mittens the cat as she infiltrates a secret research facility. Aided by Lazy Susan the hedgehog who keeps in radio contact from home base, Mittens stumbles into a quantum experiment and gains incredible new powers – the ability to be in two places at once. This quantum superstate obeys the uncertainty principle – while no one is looking, she could be in either location. Introduce an observer and things get theoretical…
Martin Binfield has worked in the games industry since the year 2000, at studios including Sony Cambridge, Jagex and Mode 7. He is an animator by trade, having worked on such titles as Heavenly Sword, LittleBigPlanet PSP, MediEvil Resurrection, Frozen Cortex and Runescape. He is a Bafta Award Winner.
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