Entangling

Shimeng Zhou

Advisor: Luisa Pereira

A two-player split-screen pixel-style game demo featuring a mechanic that everything happens in one world is reversed and mirrored in the other world. Players work together through this mirroring system to solve puzzles, balancing the dynamic between cooperation and opposition.

Project Website Presentation
Two pixel-art cave scenes side by side. The left cave is brown with a wooden ladder, a white cat and beside the cat a monitor

Project Description

"Entangling" is a two-player, split-screen 2D puzzle game in Unity that thrusts players into mirrored parallel worlds where every action has an opposite reaction. In this realm, opening a door in one world closes it in the other, forcing players to collaborate and devise creative solutions. The story follows a cat whose consciousness has been divided between these worlds, existing in a state of quantum superposition. To restore their true form, the separated entities must solve entangled puzzles and locate their missing master—the only one capable of collapsing their dual existence into a unified reality. In the ultimate challenge, they face a heart-wrenching decision: can they merge into one, or must one sacrifice their existence for the other?

Technical Details

Built in Unity 2D

Research/Context

My passion for multiplayer games comes from their unique power to connect people. When friends share a virtual world, they often reveal unexpected sides of themselves and reflect on their relationships with each other.

From this perspective, I started thinking about mechanics that emphasize the relationship between two entities. I got inspiration from ; by Isaac Asimov. In this novel, two different universes can exchange materials and depend on each other, while simultaneously causing destruction to each other. This inspired me to think about how players' relationships could be both cooperative and competitive. Similarly, in 's co-op mode, the two players (robots) are under surveillance by the narrator system, which comments on their performance throughout the game. This creates friendly competition as neither player wants to fall behind. The concepts of an interesting narrator, surveillance, two different universes affecting each other—these key ideas fascinated me.

They merged into a solid game concept when I happened to watch a YouTube video about Schrödinger's cat that included all these elements and matched perfectly with my idea for a two-player game where the players are continuously affecting each other. I dived deeper into the Schrödinger's cat experiment and related concepts like quantum entanglement, quantum superposition, and the observer's role. I integrated these into game mechanics—for example, a prop in quantum superposition exists in an uncertain state until a player "observes" it by touching it. At that point, it becomes fixed in one world while vanishing in the other. I also referenced this experiment when developing the backstory: the protagonist is a cat whose consciousness splits into two (the two players) when it begins to question its existence (whether it's alive or not).

The question that I’d like to leave to the players is: We are competing and co-existing with each other trying to be observed, but what decision would you make if being observed means the defeat of the others, and is it really necessary to be observed?