It can be unclear that you’re supposed to go a certain way and you often won’t know that you can even do a thing the game requires.In the center of each chapter’s contained puzzle area is a little model (a maquette, if you will) of the terrain around you. Maquette‘s signposting often isn’t where it needs to be. And that wasn’t the only time I had a problem. But I had assumed the tiny openings were just for show, as there was no indication that it simply wasn’t another invisible wall. It turns out I needed to shrink it and push it through a tiny opening. However, I simply couldn’t figure out how to do so. I needed to free a gem that was trapped in a house with no way out. This came to a head in one of the game’s puzzle sections. It’s often difficult to know what is and isn’t walled off, as this aspect is inconsistent. In the next, you can find invisible walls and invisible ceilings that are meant to keep you on task. In one chapter, you can break boundaries freely without worry of invisible walls. While the overall concept and puzzle mechanics in Maquette may be horribly impressive, the puzzles themselves often are not. They vary not just by puzzle type, but also by architecture and atmosphere. The game is broken into six chapters that are all unique from one another. It’s breathtaking and stays impressive for the duration of the game’s runtime, in part because it doesn’t see fit to repeat itself unnecessarily. Maquette‘s puzzles require you to use this to your advantage. There are spots where you can fall over the wall and find yourself teeny-tiny compared to the massive world. Maquette often takes place in various models of the same area. As I looked skyward, while not under the dome in the center, I noticed a much larger dome overhead. It’s not that the miniature in the dome is a little, fake version of the area. The domed area has a miniature version of the area you find yourself in, which I thought was cute. You’ll need to go into each area to bear witness to memories in order to progress the story. You go through the game’s intro and then enter a location with four areas on each side and a domed structure in the middle. I felt my eyes roll at how perfect both he and Kenzie appeared in earlier plot sections, only for the game to hit close to home once it made its goals more clear.Īt first, everything seems normal. We go along for the ride as we see the romantic tides ebb and flow, and we’re right there with him to feel the all-too-familiar sting of detachment once things inevitably start to turn. The plot begins when he finds a sketchbook he shared with his ex, Kenzie, which results in him taking a hard look at their relationship and what it meant to him. Maquette takes place from the perspective of a man named Michael. However, there’s a depth of emotion in this highly relatable tale that will stay with me far longer than some of its clunkier puzzles. The signposting can be quite rough, and the early story sequences are a bit too saccharine. Maquette is a narrative-focused first-person puzzler built around manipulating objects at various sizes to find solutions. That sense of loss is universal, but I can’t recall any games attempting to replicate it. Many of us have likely felt the lurching dread that accompanies the transition from a rollercoaster honeymoon period to a relationship that simply doesn’t quite work.
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