Maquette Reviews
It’s touching, and the puzzle side keeps you engaged while your heartstrings are being tugged.
Maquette is well worth experiencing. The use of recursive puzzles is fresh because so few games use it, and even though you can stumble upon the solution to some puzzles, most of them feel clever - even if they're relatively simple. The game does a great job of setting the player in a dreamlike state, and the story may be simple and lack details, but it still feels relatable. Maquette works perfectly as a palate cleanser for bigger and heavier games.
A unique, thoughtful narrative puzzler with a mind-bending recursive twist that succeeds by focusing more on evoking its themes than unpacking them. Some minor lapses in polish aside it's a short, sharp hit of emotion and wonder that should be on every indie puzzler fan's list.
While it misses the chance to transcend the sum of its parts, Maquette tells a beautifully relatable story with a gorgeous presentation, accompanied by a clever and unique size-bending puzzler.
This simple girl-meets-boy story plays out in a series of abstract dioramas, each one bigger than the next
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.
Maquette is a great puzzle game that uses perspective and out of the box thinking very well. The story of Michael and Kenzie is neatly entwined within these puzzle, adding heart and soul to the game as you make your way through the world, big and small.
As a debut game, Maquette has really set the bar high for the future Graceful Decay. Between the emotional story, challenging and creative puzzles and the beautiful visual style, this game is a great showcase of the talent that lives within this development team. Maquette is a refreshing entry to the first-person puzzle genre that will provide you with more than a few challenging moments and a memorable experience.
The Unfinished Swan meets Marriage Story in this debut game for Graceful Decay, as the developer explores the highs and lows of being in love in this brilliant puzzle game based around resizing objects in a scale model of a couple's relationship.
Maybe there’s no healthy way to insulate yourself from heartbreak, but there’s still beauty in the retrospective. Maquette casts a rosy lens on a love story softened by time’s eventual passage. It’s an important lesson, that the sorrow of love lost can be soothed and sanded down by the steady movement of the clock. The story’s frequent puzzle breaks mean that you’re eased into the worst of it. You’re given a long runway before the inevitable climax, which might be a blessing in itself. Even if a reflective journey through a complex relationship doesn’t appeal to you, the intricate world and it’s fascinating puzzles will surely have you hooked.
Maquette is just fascinating. It is a game that has one central mechanic and ties it into a narrative not often told by games and media. That unique blend of challenging, but mind-boggling recursive gameplay, jaw-dropping set-pieces, and heartfelt narrative moments really crafts an experience that mesmerises and stuns at every turn and is another great title from Annapurna.
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.
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 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.
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