11/6/2022 0 Comments Maquette game reviewRegardless, the environments are frequently gorgeous, filled with life and a wide color palette to match the story’s tone, as are the songs that often play as you solve puzzles. This is a good way to stop you from going on a fruitless goose chase in a place you’ve already been, but I wanted to use what I’d learned about the past areas in new puzzles. I would’ve liked to see this more often, though, instead of the common occurrence of putting a forcefield around areas when no longer in use. "One of the main reasons for Maquette’s successes is its environmental design." The most interesting moments come when the areas interconnect, requiring you to move between houses or yards to solve a single puzzle. There’s a good sense of progression every time you enter a new yard or pass a new fence because you’re often moving to either a new type of puzzle or will use an entirely new object. What works about it is that each of the offshoots, which usually contains a house or yard, is effectively its own vehicle for puzzles, and each makes mostly unique uses of the size-bending objects. Most chapters have more-or-less the same plus-sign-shaped layout, with a center that contains the miniature model and related offshoots on all four sides. One of the main reasons for Maquette’s successes is its environmental design. The middle chapters contain easily the game’s strongest puzzles, providing the best examples of making you feel clever without being overly frustrating, a mark which the rest of the chapters hit frequently enough but less consistently. A handful of puzzles had me stumped for longer than I care to admit, but the solutions were often more groan-inducing than revelatory, especially when the puzzles become more meta. Later on, though, puzzles are more inconsistent. In the beginning, the game does a great job at easing you into the different types of solutions you’ll need to understand later in the game, a slow but necessary tactic for the occasionally-mind-bending mechanic. The puzzles themselves hover over the line between frustrating and clever. You do really need to start to think outside the box, especially as a third, even larger world comes into play and throws a wrench in the entire system. As the game progresses, you have to control the sizes and locations of many more objects, including everything from crystals to stairways, in order to progress the story. A few other mechanics sneak their way in, especially one chapter that uses special crystals to open particular doorways, but they all invariably revolve around the different-sized versions of the same world. This is the basis for every puzzle in Maquette’s three-to-four-hour runtime. "Maquette is another entry into the crowded first-person indie puzzle landscape, this time as the debut from developer Graceful Decay, but it’s also one of the more mechanically unique ones." If you place that key from the real world into the model, a larger key will appear in the real world whose size is proportional to the original key’s size in the model. In the majority of the game’s six main chapters, you’re dropped into a contained, normally proportioned world, in the center of which is an exact model of that world, and every item and building in the model has the same function as in the larger world and can be upscaled or downscaled based on if it is placed in the model or the real world. It will probably take you a few minutes to get used to Maquette’s recursive worlds before you start to make any progress on its puzzles. It doesn’t fully realize the potential of its unique gameplay mechanic or its touching love story, nor does it reach above and beyond to transcend its own mechanics, but Maquette finds ways to be joyous, heartbreaking, clever, and frustrating and is certainly a worthy way to satisfy the lovers and the thinkers alike. #MAQUETTE GAME REVIEW FULL#Set in a recursive, size-bending world, Maquette also paints its gameplay against the backdrop of a full relationship, all of its joys, stresses, and pains. It’s another entry into the crowded first-person indie puzzle landscape, this time as the debut from developer Graceful Decay, but it’s also one of the more mechanically unique ones. Maquette is the type of game you have to see to understand.
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