MaK is a sandbox Super Mario Galaxy, with extra physics

The oddly named MaK is a game that combines the tiny planetoids and playful gravity of Super Mario Galaxy with a physics engine Isaac Newton would be proud of - and he's a notoriously hard man to please. At its heart is a sandbox building game with action elements, much like any of the 3,000 similar games currently in development, but MaK sets itself apart by taking place in the vast emptiness of space, where no one can hear you scream "Minecraft."

Eschewing the trend for sculpting structures out of bits of the Earth, Verge's in-development title revolves around collecting and be-snapping multicoloured blocks. As well as placing them by hand, you can also tether them together, pass electrical currents through them, and even tie blocks to balloons and watch them hover above the ground. It's the physics that makes it, that and the sublimely realised relative gravity, and you can see ample evidence of just how well they work together in the following video.

The game is currently a long way off - the team expect to be done towards the end of 2013 - but if it sounds like your kind of thing MaK sure to check out its Steam Greenlight page .

Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.