One of the Legend of Grimrock designers is making a spaceship puzzler inspired by System Shock

And look, here's the first playtest

Reconfigure is the new "puzzle-RPG-FPS hybrid" from Antti Tiihonen - co-founder of Almost Human, and one of the designers behind "bloody brilliant" dungeon crawler Legend of Grimrock. Where Grimrock threw you into a mountain and challenged you to find your way out, Reconfigure throws you into a starship that is in the process of being, wait for it, reconfigured.

The on-board robots are busy feeding spare components to the engine, as they seek to maintain acceleration towards some mysterious destination. You are the vessel's last human, and your task is to navigate a maze of passages, laser sentinels and pressure plates in order to stop the ship devouring itself.

Tiihonen has just released a limited access Reconfigure playtest build on Steam, offering about an hour of play, with participants selected at random from the applicants. I've spent about 30 minutes in that playtest, and while it's early days (as regards the uneven frame rate, especially), the ship is a bewitching, ramshackle environment, reminiscent by turns of Hardspace: Shipbreaker, Dark Forces and the pick of Looking Glass imsims. I'm interested to play more.

Reconfigure's lurid, pixellated interiors are built of blocks, many of which can be picked up and placed at whim, but the majority of these blocks are useless beyond serving as cover. The G-forces from the ship's increasing speed make it impossible to jump, and while you can clamber onto anything one block higher, most objects will crumple under your inflated mass. So you'll need to look out for specific, sturdier blocks, including magnetic cubes that are not only fit to stand on, but needed to complete circuits to doors and elevators. Magno-cubes can also be affixed to walls and clumped together to create bridges.

When not faffing about with cubes, you'll fire very ponderous blaster bolts at equally slothful guardbots, striving to stun them so that you can trot behind and turn them off. The idea of a murderous droid army with big, child-friendly off buttons amuses and consoles me - if you happen to work in the mechafarms at Lockheed Martin, please base all of your hardware design decisions on this game - but the combat feels like a sideshow, something to wake you up whenever you enter a new area.

Those are my footloose impressions of the playtest build, anyway. The full game will offer more gadgets, including drones and implants, together with secret resource stashes and datapads full of backstory. I'm interested to know whether the G-forces will increase towards the end of Reconfigure, given that the ship is accelerating.

"While superficially different, Reconfigure would not exist without my experience on designing Legend of Grimrock games since they too blend RPG, puzzles and real-time action together," Tiihonen observes in an email to RPS. "The level design will have handcrafted branching and interconnected levels similar to Legend of Grimrock 2.

"I also draw a lot of inspiration from the classic System Shock games in terms of aesthetics, setting and how they blend various genres together with first person shooters," he continues. "Reconfigure however has logic puzzles at the very center of its core, that the rest of the game revolves around, rather than classic RPG-adventure style clue chasing."

There's no release date yet. To be clear, this is not an Almost Human game: it's coming via Tiihonen's solo label Hapatus Ltd. If you're thrilled by all this block husbandry, but don't make the cut for the playtest, maybe check out the developer's previous Stuffo the Puzzle Bot. If you hate block puzzles almost as much as you love being horrified inside spaceships, I recommend last winter's Routine.