Maquette bills itself as a “recursive puzzle game” on account of its mechanical in-folding, but its foundational meaning is somewhat more nuanced. Yet just like how every song that comes on the radio is about you and your recent ex, here you may just find the perfect analogy to how it all fell apart. It is difficult to relate to such media properties when they aren’t necessarily front and centre in your life. Maquette errs more toward being a controller driven Marriage Story rather than an emotionally charged Portal. It’s nothing unexpected, though its familiarity highlights how strong the performance of its two leads actors is. Michael and Kenzie’s relationship, condensed into this collection of chapters, hits all the strides of your typical rom-com or drama film. Maquette declares itself to be the opposite – one about sifting through the wreckage of things gone wrong, an attempt to find understanding and peace at the end of the road. Repetitive and grind based, with the story playing second fiddle to the mechanical flow of going through the motions, allowing the mind to process trauma in the background. Whenever hearing about games that friends fell into around a breakup, similar tropes tend to pop up. That, along with the highlights of Michael and Kenzie’s relationship told primarily through voice and floating text, built up enough curiosity to need to see how things were going to wrap up. I will say, while the back half of Maquette doesn’t get that much more mechanically complex, it feels like the game hits more of a stride, offering up the odd stunning vista.
Don’t feel bad about looking up a solution or two – it certainly helped smooth out the rough edges during my four or so hours. It’s a tough act to balance in any game, let alone one as focused as this. I’m not necessarily one to argue that a game needs to be mechanically novel to be interesting – I’ve argued against that notion several times in the last few months alone – but getting caught in the friction of an unsolved puzzle in Maquette breaks the magic somewhat.
Maquette is broken up into rigid chapters, with specific puzzles built around a designed solution, and making your way through from beginning to end is predicated on performing the necessary actions.Īll things told it’s… not overly compelling, most of the time. There isn’t really much room for experimentation in puzzle solving, no creative solutions to world traversal or progression. Working your way through Maquette’s story is a very guided experience. Maquette isn’t a game necessarily about the mechanics of traversing large and small environments – it instead uses these to tell a story of love, loss and heartbreak. Maquette is less a first-person puzzle game and more a first-person story game with some mechanical gating based around lock-and-key puzzles. Think of Maquette instead along the lines of What Remains of Edith Finch and Gone Home, however, and you might end up with more well-adjusted expectations.
When trying to hold Maquette up in comparison with games such as Portal and Superliminal, you’ll probably find it comes up a bit short. Maquette – When A Molehill Becomes A Mountain PS4/5
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