Maquette is the debut puzzle game from developer Graceful Decay and another feather in publisher Annapurna Interactive's (I Am Dead, Sayonara Wild Hearts) cap. As with many good puzzling titles these days, it has a great gimmick. Portal had portals, Superliminal had perspective, and Maquette has three different worlds running simultaneously.
If you've watched a trailer of the game, like the one below, you'll know what I mean when I say it's a Russian doll mechanic. You, the player, have three versions of a world to interact with to work out puzzles - a tiny dolls-house-sized version, a normal human-sized version, and a giant version that makes the player about the size of a mouse. When you move a cube the size of a pebble in the doll-sized world, a boulder will move in the human-sized version, and a mountain will move in the giant's.
You're not even just limited to moving items in the original size they came in - picking up an item the size of a pebble in your ordinary would and dropping that into the doll-sized world means that same pebble drops into your world again, but this time it's the size of a boulder. This sizing up and down technique is one of a few rules that are important to solving the puzzles you face.
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Beneath the puzzles, there is a narrative, and Maquette is a love story at its heart. The stimulating (yet sometimes infuriating) puzzles are ultimately set dressing for what the game wants to tell you. Unlike Portal where the puzzles and the story connect effortlessly, Maquette's world is a stage to tell you about a relationship. The characters of Michael and Kenzie meet in a coffee shop and draw wonderful ideas together, a sort of vague hint that the world you're exploring is an interpretation of the visions they have. Vignettes play here and there of their relationship blooming, awkward encounters they have, and some secrets they share. Played by Bryce Dallas Howard and Seth Gabel (a real-life couple), it's all very cute - adorable, even, hearing them nattering to each other.
The problem with Maquette, however, might be how different its two main subjects are. One is this astonishingly pretty and intricate space and its puzzles; and the other is a very normal, very usual set of romantic circumstances. An ordinary tale in an extraordinary world. You want exploration and depth in your surroundings, but instead, you get detail upon detail about the lovers, and their story plays out in a fairly predictable fashion. Suffice to say that nothing lasts forever.
From the beginning of the game, the premise is that we're looking back on the memories shared between the couple, which sets us up to feel a certain way about their story's conclusion (and yes, I'm trying to not give too much away, here). While the puzzles can dazzle, there's never a surprise narratively.
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I had to complete a load of puzzles to find out that I was completely right about my expectations for the pair - and it really wasn't hard to guess at their fate. Of course, the dialogue is fun at points, and no chunk of the story is long enough to be actively bored by, but it feels like listening to scenes I'd heard in a million romcoms before. It's almost like a game adaptation of 500 Days of Summer.
Additionally, some of the puzzles didn't feel all that fair. You suddenly find that you can't put items down in certain spaces, for example - or because you have done so much walking and spatial navigation, you might just miss something crucial to solving a puzzle. Maquette is a little inconsistent in where its puzzles are challenging and fair, and then where they're baffling. I also experienced a few bugs with the game, that trapped objects so I couldn't move them, and would have to reload - but frequent autosaves made sure this wasn't a huge frustration.
Maquette, in many ways, is a delight. Visually it's stunning, and the puzzles you encounter are often nice little brain teasers - I can imagine playing on a sofa with a significant other would elicit some fun conversations in the same way a murder mystery might. It has its problems and it's not perfect, but, as I said, you should think of Maquette as a rom-com of games. Not the highest form of art and not up for an Oscar nomination, but something you can certainly enjoy on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
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Pros: Beautiful world, ingenious mechanics, good voice performances
Cons: Uninteresting story, strange pacing, puzzles sometimes feel really unfair or annoying
For fans of: Superliminal, 500 Days of Summer, puzzle games generally
6/10
Maquette was tested on PC with code provided by the publisher. The game is available now on PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, and PC. Find a guide to GAMINGbible's review scores here.
Featured Image Credit: Annapurna InteractiveTopics: Reviews, Annapurna Interactive