Expecting it to be a hardcore puzzle game isn’t fair, and the high quality of both its voice acting and art design never falter, but you can’t help but wonder what might have been if the game had pushed itself just slightly harder in the direction of brain teasing. Maquette is a love story with some interesting and occasionally obtuse puzzles to lend it shape and structure. Its relatively short runtime may be extended by those protracted moments of wandering, but equally the intellectual supercharging that might have brought this into the same territory as The Witness just isn’t there.
Unlike Portal’s increasingly mind-bending use of the portal gun, Maquette’s recursion is used often but never in ways that surpass the revelations made in the opening hour of the game. However, you can’t help feeling as though the structure of the levels isn’t quite fully explored. Hardspace: Shipbreaker PS5 review - salvaging the future It’s certainly every inch an Annapurna release, with the kind of rich emotional range many games ignore in favour of violence. It’s a nice feature and gives the game a sense of momentum and purpose that it might lack with the puzzles alone. The plot neatly mirrors the puzzles, with the lovers’ quirks gradually starting to become major annoyances, in the same way that small objects turn into massive ones depending on where you put them. Those regularly end with the realisation that you’re barking up the wrong tree entirely, forcing you to retrace your steps at the same soporific pace. There’s no run button, and that’s fine when you’re in your native scale, but the next level up makes a short jaunt into a mind-numbingly tedious multi-minute stroll. That’s a problem exacerbated by the exponential increases in distance. The text of the story helps with that, showing you the area in which you should be looking, as do the translucent barriers that fence off parts of the level you definitely don’t need to be working with, but it’s still easy to spend long periods aimlessly wandering in search of the small clue or item you missed. One of those is knowing what you’re supposed to be doing at any given moment. The concept is not without its problems though. Maquette – the key to the solution (pic: Annapurna Interactive) The same works in reverse, scaling things up to make them useful in completely different scenarios – keys becoming bridges or ramps, letting you access otherwise unreachable areas.
Drop a regular-sized item out of a window into the larger scale world, and when you retrieve it in your own environment it will appear to have shrunk. Like the drawings from the sketchbook, the story’s text appears written on buildings and walls, helping guide you to the next puzzle.Īs well as echoing changes to your environment, you can also use changes in scale to re-size objects. Wandering through Maquette’s serene, pastel-hewn world, studded with Disney-style palaces and colourful gazebos, you come across a model of the very gardens you’re in, where you discover how its systems work and that changes you make are mirrored at every scale. Played by Bryce Dallas Howard and Fringe’s Seth Gabel, the voice acting is excellent, helping prevent the protagonists’ scripted quirkiness from becoming toe curling. You never see their faces, just hear their conversations while watching the contents of their mutually drawn sketchbook appear in real-time, scrawled across the scenery. The game’s meet-cute opening has two artists begin their relationship over a spilled drink in a San Francisco coffee shop. A concept reminiscent of 2019’s A Fisherman’s Tale but without the VR.
Each scene in Maquette is told in a recursive space where the room you’re in is echoed by larger ones in successive scales up, and smaller ones built in miniature in what look like perfectly made dioramas of the room you’re in.
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Maquette joins this long line of immersive puzzlers, with its touching love story told via a series of puzzles that play with the idea of scale and perspective. From classics like The Witness and The Talos Principle, to The Turing Test and dozens of lesser known indie titles, it’s become a popular way of delivering brain teasers alongside atmosphere and plot. The latest indie release from Annapurna Interactive is a mix of love story and first person puzzler, with voiceovers from Bryce Dallas Howard.Įver since Portal’s release in 2007, there’s been a steady stream of first person puzzle games, where previously the concept was almost unknown. Maquette – a fairytale puzzle (pic: Annapurna Interactive)
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