Maquette Reviews
Maquette is a beautiful, artistic puzzle game waiting to tell a story. The concept is good, but the implementation leaves a lot to be desired. At times, it can have glitches and feel a little clunky, but if you can overlook that, you might find Maquette's story is just what you need.
Maquette toys with interesting ideas and its unique core gameplay mechanic is enough to make it stand out. However, the poorly developed plot and weak conclusion make the game feel like a rough draft of something much stronger.
The puzzles compel, while the narrative stalls, and there is something worthy in that mismatch. I only wish that breakup at its core yielded something worth holding on to.
Maquette's core concept of puzzle solving in recursive environments is undeniably neat. But despite the handful of wow moments it enables, developer Graceful Decay ends up squandering much of the idea's potential due to pacing issues and rough edges.
Maquette has something special. It delicately tells a very credible story with some clever puzzles mechanics and brillant emotional moments - thanks to the performance of Bryce Dallas Howard ans Seth Gabel. But it's flawed by some painful pacing issues and some other problems that prevent it from being truly memorable.
Review in French | Read full review
If you can pick up Maquette from free as March 2021’s PlayStation Plus title, it’s difficult to argue against. But if you’re looking to pay full price for this 3-hour puzzler, you’re money’s better spent elsewhere.
The story that should compel us to keep playing instead becomes an annoying digression from what the game does well. These environments, those puzzles, and the size-changing gimmick that lets you solve them comprise a unique and fascinating vision that depends on the kind of esoteric thinking familiar from classic point-and-click adventure games. Instead of pulling us in deeper, though, Michael and Kenzie's romance pushes us away. That's the real tragedy of Maquette.
Maquette - and the development team - deserve better. There's some real talent evident in the unique, interesting, contemplative and rewarding puzzle design here, and that kind of quality occurs less and less frequently in this vapid and action-obsessed industry. The development team also know how to write interesting and emotionally engaging narratives - we don't see stories about love told with this kind of sincerity anywhere near often enough. Unfortunately, the one and only problem that the game has is also the thing that almost breaks it; the two elements that the entire experience relies on are at near-complete odds with one another.
However, this story ends up being undercut by uneven gameplay, glitches, and subpar performance. If you can approach it with patience, you might appreciate the mesmerizing set pieces and a story that will surely tug at your heartstrings. But after my experience with Maquette, and encountering one too many shoddy 3D puzzles, I'm inclined to just swipe left.
For a puzzle game exploring altered perspectives within its mechanics and themes on a grand scale, Grateful Decay's debut can be considered a limited success.
The verdict in this Maquette review is that the game isn’t worth playing. It’s a shame that it isn’t better, because the initial concept of resizing objects with the maquette is truly unique. However, it’s not explored nearly enough, the game’s puzzles aren’t enjoyable to solve, and the game’s story is an enormous load of nothing. The biggest puzzle in Maquette is figuring out why anyone would want to play it.
Maquette is definitely not perfect. However, its very special concept, its wonderful aesthetic and some inspiring moments, were enough to keep me until the end and give it an interesting personality.
Review in Greek | Read full review
Superliminal meets The Unfinished Swan in an admirable debut effort from Grateful Decay, that's best when it sticks to the ingenous premise.
It reminds me of a relationship I had, one that I thought I would never see myself out of. It's these memories of mine that give Maquette's narrative that emotional weight, even when the writing is clumsy or stilted. 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 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. And Maquette has the right beats, and recursions, to bring up that feeling in me, that conflicting sense of scale.