Maquette

For a game that's all about finding closure in our lives, Maquette makes it exceptionally difficult to get to its end credits.

Definitely give Maquette a try if you like puzzle games, but be aware that you’re likely to come up against numerous brick walls as you vie to reach its conclusion. The earlier puzzles are truly satisfying to crack but they quickly lose their charm, while later conundrums might leave you scratching your head in frustration. What doesn’t lose its charm, though, is the small yet beautiful narrative that you’ll want to savour every moment of. It’s just a shame there isn’t more of it.

Maquette's world-bending puzzles are fun at first but, alongside its cliché story, they do grow tiresome as the game draws to a close.

Breakups are the absolute worst. They leave a crater in your life that stretches for miles in every direction. The event itself burns like mercury stew, so why not wrap it in a protective layer of puzzle game? Maquette explores the existential horror that is heartbreak with a complex set of recursive puzzles, plunging you into a beautiful prison which somehow contains itself forever in every direction. While the game’s emotional tone comes in fits and starts, the puzzle world itself is almost indescribably beautiful. Seriously, if what I say next fails to make sense, there’s a handy gameplay t...

Overall, Maquette is a solid and unique puzzle game with a sentimental, well-performed story that may hit a little too close to home for some, while maybe providing some closure for others. If only the developer found a way to intertwine the puzzles and the story together to feel more complete.

Maquette pairs a novel puzzle-solving apparatus with a plaintive romance saga.

Maquette’s strength mostly lies in its beautifully told narrative and wonderfully voice-acted characters, and if this were a review of the story alone, we might give it a higher rating. The gameplay is interesting, however, there’s often only one right answer. Plus it’s hard to ignore performance issues like stuttering and the dreaded restarts. For us, playing Maquette was a lot like Michael and Kenzie’s relationship. It was sometimes wonderful, sometimes frustrating, and, though it’s probably not something we’ll return to, it was worth our time – even if it didn’t last long.

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 anothe...

A welcome surprise to PlayStation Plus’ March 2021 free games, I was able to get my hands on Maquette a few days prior to launch. Unique puzzle games seem to find their way into my hands and Maquette is definitely one of the more intriguing ones available right now.

Maquette is a tricky game to explain in words, but here goes. This first-person puzzler is set in a recursive universe — meaning each iteration of the world contains within it a smaller version of itself. By extension, that means there are ever-larger worlds beyond your reach. It's one of those concepts that's easier to understand with a visual, and the moment you enter the game's main area, it all clicks into place.

If you can pick up Maquette from free as March 2021's PlayStation Plus title, it's difficult to argue against. But if you're looking to pay full price for this 3-hour puzzler, you're money's better spent elsewhere.

The puzzles compel, while the narrative stalls, and there is something worthy in that mismatch. I only wish that the breakup at its core yielded something worth holding on to.