The developers have told us they want to blur the lines between creation and gameplay, as well as between developer and player, and as such, the world-editing tools are extremely simple to use. So simple, in fact, that if we hadn't actually tried them ourselves, we'd still think they were too good to be true.

Let's start with actually creating objects. At any time during gameplay, hitting the Square button brings up a little floating menu over your Sackboy's head. Open up the Swag Bag icon, and you'll be presented with an assortment of things you can bring into the world, including stickers (more on those momentarily), simple shapes and more complex objects that you can snag from pre-built levels and store for later use. To start with, the simple shapes - called "primitives" in-game - are the most compelling, despite being just 3D rectangles, triangles and circles of varying textures. Like all objects in LittleBigPlanet, these can be rubber-stamped into the world as many times as you want (although they'll fall if you just rubber-stamp a bunch of them into the air and then close the menu), and you can easily adjust their size and depth using the analog sticks, making them as big, small, narrow or wide as you want.

But what's really cool about them is that if you rubber-stamp one shape so that it's overlapping another, they'll actually merge together, creating one bigger, slightly more complex shape. And you can also cut holes in those shapes - or just about anything else - using the same tools, and if you're cutting (or adding onto) a fabric-textured object, it stitching and trim will change with its new shape. The developers gave us a quick demonstration of how this works by making a screen-filling, snowman-like figure out of wood-textured circles, then punching two circular holes in his head to make eyes. They then stuck a couple of giant pinwheels to his "hands" with rotating bolts and decorated him with stickers, but we're getting ahead of ourselves here.

By the time the game is finished, there'll likely be some kind of cap placed on the number of things you can create. Just to see how much we could get away with, however, we decided to spawn several dozen cubes in midair, ranging in size from miniscule to huge, with a relatively complex fabric texture. They rained down and our Sackboy kicked the little ones around happily, but our clever gambit had failed: at no point did the game so much as stutter.