Titles like fellow Annapurna-published game Florence or Nina Freeman’s We Met in May built on the importance of small moments to create emotional weight. It is refreshing to see romance as the beating heart of a video game. Image: Graceful Decay/Annapurna Interactive Their relationship shatters for seemingly small reasons, but in their intimate world, the details loom so much larger. Perhaps these mundane parts of the relationship, how unevenly people fall in and out of love, provide contrast for the fantastical game world - the space Michael and Kenzie built together and in which they hold themselves up. And Maquette has the right beats, and recursions, to bring up that feeling in me, that conflicting sense of scale.Īt times, I rolled my eyes at Michael’s whiny moments, or about some of the small things the couple fought about. It’s hard to imagine that there was a time when it was so much bigger, where I lived in a fantasy world of my own creation - but I did. When I look back at that relationship, it’s only just a speck in my 32 years of life, something that hardly gets a thought. It’s these memories of mine that give Maquette’s narrative that emotional weight, even when the writing is clumsy or stilted. It reminds me of a relationship I had, one that I thought I would never see myself out of. In Maquette, we’re in this guy’s head, his grand world and vision, alternatingly romanticized and idealized, constantly centered on himself. But though relationships live and die every day, to the couple in love (and then, not in love), the bond can feel like everything.
The couple has a familiar, if not dull romance. Perspective makes all the difference not just in solving the puzzles, but in making sense of the story.
There aren’t evil tricks that artificially inflate the difficulty or pad out a level you just need the right perspective, noticing small things that might have big meaning in another context. Puzzles range from very easy to shockingly hard, but they never feel broken or unfair. But a key found on the ground earlier is actually the solution - once the small key is dropped into the smaller maquette, in the right slot, it can act as the large missing piece of the bridge in the bigger version of the world that you inhabit. A gap in a bridge appears, with no apparent way to cross. If you liked games like The Witness and Manifold, Maquette is a joy to get lost in.Puzzles at the start of Maquette are relatively simple, defining the rules of the world. Nested in Maquette’s puzzles is a mature, nostalgic, and emotional story waiting to be discovered. Explore houses, palaces, museums, carnivals, and more, and watch them transform as the story progresses. Take your time exploring beautiful environments with vibrant colors and realistic ambient sounds. This mechanic reflects the inward-looking story of Maquette, where something that starts as a small problem can become an insurmountable issue later down the line.
A tiny crack in the wall can become a passage to another world, and a normal ticket stub dropped in the small world becomes enormous in the large world. Objects in one environment, such as a barrier blocking your way into an area, are reflected in the small world and the larger worlds simultaneously.Īs such, the game makes you think of ways to use objects creatively. An experimental first-person POV recursive puzzle game, Maquette is a world built like Russian dolls-that is, a world set in another world within another world.
Maquette begins with a budding romance between strangers, then turns into a strange world where nothing, including how the sizes of objects relate to each other, is as it seems.
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