Maquette
Graceful Decay’s romantic recursive puzzler won’t be tied down
PC
When you’re alone, the world seems made for two. Maquette’s fantastical environments are full of such mockery: parallel paths threading through twin archways, mirrored flowerbeds and fountains. The absence of somebody is felt, even before the story we’re following takes a wistful turn.
And we are, indeed, following it: much as in previous Annapurna-published walking sim What Remains Of Edith Finch, handwritten words melt into being on walls and in the air, leading the way. In wandering Maquette’s verdant gardens and lonely carnivals, you’re retracing the steps of a relationship. Recursive puzzles, meanwhile, speak to a different aspect of love affairs: how things that once seemed so small can become gigantic, world-altering fixtures in our lives.
As we carry around a curious cube, we’re put in mind of Manifold Garden; when we set it down in the centre of a diorama of the courtyard we’re currently standing in and hear it fall with a ceramic clunk behind us as a now much larger object, we think of Superliminal. But Maquette has existed as a prototype since 2011, when game designer and Graceful Decay founder Hanford Lemoore submitted it to GDC’s Experimental Gameplay Workshop. “Some of my game design heroes came up to me and were like, ‘This looks really cool, you should work on it,’” he tells us. “And one of the things I was told was: hide it. They said, ‘That’s a mechanic that, like, if a video gets out there, it will get copied. Just figure out what you want to do with it, keep quiet and then, you know – when you’re ready.’ So that’s kind of what we’ve been doing.” Eventually, he and the designers of many of those other games – all of whom had independently had a similar brainwave – made their own Slack group to chat with, and help, each other. “At first there’s this idea to be super-protective: ‘No, those guys are the enemy.’ But of course they’re not. We’re all having to wrap our heads around these game design problems that are really, really hard to understand.”
Finding Maquette’s unique take on the recursive puzzle game has taken time – nine years of it. “The first thing I did was I slapped a story on it, almost without thinking, that was basically a justification for the game mechanic,” Lemoore says. Back then, the player was a prisoner trapped inside a magical world: indeed, we still see shades of enchantment in Maquette’s architecture. “I realised at some point, I hated my story,” Lemoore continues. “Like, I didn’t care about it.” He put the game out of his mind, and went back to writing short stories to remind himself why he enjoyed storytelling. One of his favourites chronicled a relationship. “I had that moment of, ‘It sucks that I can’t use this story for my videogame
“It dawned on me that [a love story] was actually the twist the game needed”
because, you know, it’s a puzzle game and this is a love story.’ And then it dawned on me that that was actually the twist the game needed.”
Lemoore was surprised at how readily his level layout for the game mapped the arc of a love story. Much of the challenge of designing Maquette, he tells us, has been “letting the player make their own connections between the puzzles they’re solving and the story they’re being told.” He sees it as akin to a connect-the-dots puzzle: provide too many dots, and the player doesn’t have to make a connection – practical or emotional. We can see the intent during our demo, even if not all of it translates. We enjoy fantasising about the narrative significance of a key that proves, erm, key to a later puzzle, for instance. But we try countless solutions before the right one, because its connection to the part of the story being told isn’t clear – some misleading wording seems too much like a clever clue, sending our mind in the wrong direction, and the solution falls flat.
We often leave half a sentence hanging in the air, too, while we cast around for a puzzle solution, halting the steady momentum of the typical walking sim and making it hard to recall what’s been said. Things aren’t quite clicking as they should just yet. But this is the earliest section of the game, and our understanding of Maquette’s love language may well deepen over time – it takes two to tango, after all.