Hello ladies, gentlemen and those of a non-binary nature, my name is Daibhi and this is the Gamerhub community. Has there ever been a puzzle-based video game you find yourself getting lost in despite the game being a bit… well… flawed? Well, that is exactly what I found myself in this week when I sank myself into Maquette a relatively new game available on PlayStation 4 and 5, the Xbox Series and Xbox One consoles and PC. Puzzle games really aren’t my sort of game, as I’m more of a tactics and racing gamer, but the thing about being a video games reviewer is that you don’t always get to review the games you want, but you have to review the games given to you. I did enjoy it, and more on that later, but it suffices to say that I don’t think that I was the person this game was made for.

Maquette is a Puzzle-adventure video game developed by Graceful Decay (nope, I’d never heard of them before this either) and developed by Annapurna Interactive. This game was released in 2021 for the PS4, PS5 and PC, with Xbox Series, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch ports getting launched later in July of 2023. It’s Graceful Decay’s debut game and as a result, I’m going to be as nice as I can for this one, as nobody likes dunking on a debut game.

Plot

Just like every good film in Hollywood, sometimes the best stories in video games are love stories. They don’t have to be about a boy meeting a girl, or two brothers getting rid of a powerful object in a volcano, but they can be powerful. This game is no exception. I won’t ruin it for you, but this game is centred around a love story about two artists in San Francisco who fall in and then very much fall out of love. The mundanity of that built around the fabric of a game involving Superliminal like puzzles to get through an adventure is this game’s arguable highlight and lowlight. The story is just enough to keep you hooked, but barely does anything with this story too keep you entertained for too long.

It fits the game’s play length well enough, but honestly, I would have loved to have been surprised by the plot at some points and I just wasn’t. This game, as brilliant as the gameplay is, left nothing to the imagination, and I genuinely feel a bit let down by it. The voice acting and gameplay seem to be where most of Graceful Decay’s budget went, and it really does show with the plot. It’s a shame, because there were times during the playthrough of this game where I felt it could get very easy to be lost in this beautiful, topsy-turvy world.

Gameplay

This game requires you to solve puzzles in order to get through it and although they’re nothing short of enthralling, they do get a bit repetitive. It reminds me of Alice from Through The Looking Glass, as you constantly have to shrink or enlarge objects in order to get through them. Unlike Superliminal, however, where time is not on your side, I spent a good half an hour negotiating with the controls to work out how to get around things. There’s very little in the way for help for newcomers to this genre. It felt really surreal at points, as if I was a 10 year old first picking up a controller again, with none of the nostalgia and warmth that experience would give me.

Maquette’s puzzles are all about forced perspective. Objects that seem small from a distance getting gigantic when up close and personal. A highlight for me was to make a small golden key turn into a bridge to cross a ravine and the detail on this was a lot better than I expected. The design of this game is that you’re in a diorama (a small model of a world for our British readers), but like inception, you’re oftwen wondering whether the diorama you’re in is in another diorama. It’s at this point, I’m almost reminded of the song “The Windmills Of Your Mind” by Dusty Springfield, as it honestly felt as if the puzzles were never-ending. How very wrong I was.

The biggest major gripe I have with this game is that the concept is incredible, but the execution is not. The game has too many problems with storytelling and length to be a good game, even if the gameplay is absolutely the reason why you should play this game. The diorama is a metaphor for the human mind within the honeymoon phase of a romantic relationship, and yes, maybe the game’s length itself is metaphor for how sweet that phase is, but this game simply isn’t clever enough for them to justify such a claim. I don’t think just revealing the storyline on walls as you proceed through the puzzles with the disembodied voice of Bryce Dallas Howard is enough to satisfy most gamers, even if Bryce is the best thing Ron ever made.

Graphics

The Graphics of this game are good, and there was no blank space I could find through 4 playthroughs of this game. Not a single part of the game has been wasted, even if you turn your viewpoint around 360 degrees to try and find it. For me, considering how much I’ve ragged on this game already, that was a high point. This really does come into its own when coming up with making things bigger as you can see a lot more detail than you were bargaining for. This is a metaphor for the relationship that I will let Graceful Decay and Annapurna Interactive have, as this works well for the narrative of the game whilst also being a brilliant aspect of the game.

Price Point

This game is available on Microsoft’s Game Pass, as well as retailing on their digital store for £16.74, which I can’t really be angry at, as I would have priced this game myself around a similar price point. For those of us using PlayStations, this game isn’t available on the PlayStation Plus system but you can buy it for £5.99 until the second of August, where the game goes up to £14.99. For those of us that use Nintendo Switch consoles, this game is available for purchase at £16.99.

Overview

Would I personally buy this game for myself? No. It’s not that I don’t like this genre, it’s just that I have played so many better games of this type and dropping money on this seems like a waste of cash and time. That’s not to say that you won’t enjoy it, just that I didn’t. This game genuinely thinks that it is far more clever than it is. Oddly enough, a film that Bryce Dallas Howard has been in recently (Jurassic World Dominion) has much the same problems in some areas.
Unlike Jurassic World Dominion, however, this game is far to short for the game’s unique selling points to qualify me giving this a good review. You can’t qualify a rushed and short game on the themes of a story and then ask people to spend hard-earned money on it without the story really making someone feel. I had very little to no emotional connection with this game, and I’m disappointed. I wanted to feel something. I wanted this game to make me feel something. In the end, the game did make me feel something- disappointment.

Joystick rating: 2.3 out of 5 Joysticks

For the Gamerhub community, I’ve been Daibhi and you are all legends.