Maquette

An adventure game with fresh puzzle mechanics and a well-expressed love story, which, however, inadequately connects both elements.

Maquette is a beautiful puzzle game with a catchy soundtrack that really sets the chill yet heart-breaking vibe of the game. The way it messes around with space and depth keeps things fresh throughout and the game looks damn fine, making it an overall positive experience. However, it had an opportunity to make much stronger links between its puzzle world and its narrative world and it saddens me that this didn’t occur.

Maquette stands out for an excellent love story that affects the aesthetics of the stage. It is very well written and excellently interpreted. It is fresh, natural, credible, and its development makes us want to move forward.

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. The integration of puzzles and story never gel as it should, with only the setting feeling like it was at all related to the narrated events, but even so the pace of each was strong enough that it never feels like things lag — solve puzzle, get story. Usually just a few lines at a time, hovering over a wall or other piece of environment, but it still felt like a nice way to mark progress as one solution flowed into another. Without the story Maquette would still be a nicely-intriguing puzzler, and the scaling of the environments made for truly enjoyable moments when what seemed like a small irrelevant detail on a prop turned into the solution to a whole area. At this point it should be clear that I’ve got mixed feelings on Maquette, but there’s no question that I’m glad to have played it and won’t be forgetting the game any time soon.

Romantic relationships have their ups and downs, and players will likely go through the same experience with Maquette, which seesaws between satisfying and frustrating. Charming world design and bittersweet relationship observations are offset by a couple of opaque puzzles and patches of gameplay clunkiness (bad enough to force level restarts), which mar the overall sense of enjoyment.

Maquette is a sort of sketch of a finished sculpture, or an architectural model… is the game saying this relationship was a sketch of better times, a process to go through in order to reach some future ideal? If so, it’s a well-worn narrative, and nothing is added by its puzzles. It ends up feeling like a clumsy mash-up of Synecdoche, New York and 500 Days of Summer, but without the introspection of either. At the very least, its puzzles and environments are captivating, but unlike its lateral thinking solutions, it never brings a new angle to its central narrative.

Maquette has a great puzzle mechanic as its central hook, though it sometimes struggles with obtuse implementation and fussy controls. Nonetheless, the narrative arc of the young relationship at the center of the game is well worth a bit of frustration to experience. Some lovely visuals and music make playing Maquette that much more rewarding.

Maquette is a clever and gorgeous puzzle game, even if it doesn’t push the boundaries of its recursive concept very far past that initial sense of wonder.

It’s got an interesting gameplay construct and some gorgeously animated locations to explore, but some clumsy moments with controls and unclear leaps of puzzle logic mean that Maquette’s tale of whirlwind romance only flutters rather than flies.