Maquette
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Critic Reviews for Maquette
Maquette has enough interesting ideas to push any adventure gamer past the finish line.
Superliminal meets The Unfinished Swan in an admirable debut effort from Grateful Decay, that's best when it sticks to the ingenous premise.
Maquette is an incredibly clever and absolutely gorgeous first-person puzzle game, even if it doesn’t really push the boundaries of its own recursive concept in any particularly surprising ways. That left me feeling like its straightforward story and puzzles were a missed opportunity to do something more, but playing through Maquette’s brief adventure was at least a lovely, mind-tickling evening well spent.
When Maquette is firing on all cylinders, it is a beautiful journey through a series of ever-larger environments, and Maquette’s love story is poignant and a little heartbreaking. Sadly, my interactions with the puzzles were also full of heartbreak. While Maquette has some missteps, I look back fondly on my time with it. Much like a real-life romance, my affection for this game is complicated.
Even with the annoyance of the narrator being so utterly clueless, there's no question that Maquette is effective at illustrating the pain of a good relationship gone bad.
Maquette's strength mostly lies in its beautifully told narrative and wonderfully voice-acted characters, and if this were a review of the story alone, we might give it a higher rating. The gameplay is interesting, however, there's often only one right answer. Plus it's hard to ignore performance issues like stuttering and the dreaded restarts. For us, playing Maquette was a lot like Michael and Kenzie's relationship. It was sometimes wonderful, sometimes frustrating, and, though it's probably not something we'll return to, it was worth our time – even if it didn't last long.
It’s not always a perfect combination. A few of the latter puzzles feel needlessly complicated, requiring you to place the objects at pixel-perfect angles to trigger the next area. But that doesn’t take away from how remarkable the game is. Like Portal before it, Maquette redefines what puzzle games are capable of, and I don’t think I’ll be forgetting about these characters any time soon.
