Maquette
PC, PS4, PS5
The perfect couples game? At times, when you’re looking around the nested worlds of Graceful Decay’s debut – mesmerising in both their imposing size and clever intricacy – you’ll certainly feel like you could use an extra pair of eyes. You might sense a touch of romance in the air, too, as you wander through a pastel-hued moonlit garden to the strains of San Franciscan Nights by Gábor Szabó and the California Dreamers. At once gently trippy and sentimental, it’s the perfect tone-setter, the line “walls move, minds do too” feeling particularly apposite in light of what comes next. Yet it’s clear from the symmetry of the place – the forking paths, the twin stairways – that there’s something (or rather someone) missing. And there’s a rueful tone to the words overlaid on these beautiful environments: a reflection on a relationship that appears to have run its course. If you do have a partner in tow when you start playing, then, you’d do well to prepare for a few moments that might just have you both shifting uncomfortably in your seat.
In truth, Maquette is much more likely to have you (and your other half, if you’re feeling brave enough) scratching your head. Yet its opening half-hour certainly benefits from our time with the preview version, and we notice a few adjustments for the better. Shimmering barriers now appear to bar the paths leading off from the central dome, cutting down on aimless wandering as you seek out the missing piece of the current puzzle. The story sections have been rescripted and recast: the central couple are now played by Bryce Dallas Howard and Seth Gabel, with Howard in particular giving us a better sense of why Kenzie might end up with Michael. It still falls into that familiar videogame trap of characters vocalising their feelings too much, but the pair’s meet-cute is sweetly disarming, and if the lovey-dovey moments that follow may be too sickly for some, they’re leavened by the knowledge that dark clouds are on the horizon.
For the most part, Maquette’s recursive puzzles deal with the resizing of objects. A small key placed within the central diorama becomes a bridge to cross outside the dome: drop it into position and you’ll hear the larger iteration land with an ominous clang behind you. Later, you’ll walk up a giant rake over some railings to an empty house, and use a staircase as a ramp over a broken fence and a way up to a second-storey window. The text often acts as a guide, occasionally giving you subtle hints but otherwise suggesting where you need to head next by its position. Yet elsewhere you’ll be left clueless. You may marvel at these astonishing feats of digital architecture, but as the environments grow and you find yourself toing and froing between the maquette and the world beyond, it’s too easy to lose your way – and your place in the story. While some puzzles are poorly communicated, the narrative often feels tenuously connected to the world: one sequence involving the use of crystals to pass through like-coloured gates is explained by a line about Kenzie picking up a palm stone. And calling a stairway a ‘wedge’ as a metaphor for relationship discord is a bit of a stretch.
If games are a dialogue between designer and player, too often it feels as if Maquette is giving us the silent treatment. (In one case, we’d likely have been struggling for hours had Annapurna not supplied a helpful guide.) It’s perhaps a generous read to say that in hindsight that hands-off approach sometimes makes a strange kind of sense – certainly in the middle chapters of the game, when the relationship begins to fragment and it seems neither party knows the right way forward. And if some puzzles are long-winded and a bit too much like hard work, you sense Graceful Decay might well know it. Indeed, one line in particular has us wondering if studio founder Hanford Lemoore – who introduced the first prototype of Maquette to the Experimental Gameplay Workshop at GDC a decade ago – is making some kind of meta-commentary about game development. “It felt like we had followed the map and we’d still gotten off course,” Michael writes. “So we just kept going, too scared to say anything was wrong.”
Maquette’s invitation to let us make our own connections between the puzzles and the story leaves gaps too wide to bridge. It lacks the clear-eyed focus of Superliminal’s forced-perspective conundrums, and the consistency and elegance of The Witness, where you could always just follow the wires when you got stuck. So it’s no surprise that it’s at its best when it uses its world rather than the challenges contained within it to underscore the narrative. When a barrier suddenly appears before us, we’re alarmed at what this means for the couple. When an ant-sized Michael steps onto a colossal pavement, we can see the widening cracks he’s talking about (even if navigating the world at this size is punishingly slow). And the game’s standout sequence involves nothing more than walking, the environment warping around you as a quiet, friendly neighbourhood grows steadily more imposing and queasily unfamiliar.
Even if the logistics of its head-spinning final conceit don’t quite stand up to scrutiny, you can’t help but admire one last swing for the fences. And as we sift through our screenshots, it’s perhaps fitting that we find the memories of the good times outweighing the bad. Though in charting the course of Michael and Kenzie’s relationship it hits upon a few hard truths (one petty row packs a winding punch), Maquette takes an optimist’s view of love’s trials. The arguments and the heartbreaks are worth it, it suggests, to have the chance to see things from another perspective – and in doing so, to have your horizons expanded. When it’s all over, the world seems a little bigger.
If games are a dialogue between designer and player, too often it feels as if this is giving us the silent treatment