Michael and Kenzie don't have much to them. The universality of the scenario is accentuated as a result, but I couldn't help but wish there was a little more meat on the bones. In fact, throughout the game you won't know if you're playing as Kenzie or Michael (the two even share the same pet name for each other, Sunflower). That said, it's an intentionally sparse narrative. The galactic proportions Grateful Decay is working with don't mesh well with rote, adventure-game tedium. A few treacly passages made me roll my eyes, but from start to finish, I wanted to see where these two ended up. Maquette lets you know exactly who these people are, and where they stood, at every point in their journey together. We never see Michael or Kenzie face to face-these cutscenes are accompanied with little more than a few drawings-but I never felt lost. In Maquette, you will move time and space to climb up a set of stairs. In The Witness, a sublime eureka moment may occur when you notice a conspicuously placed orange on an unremarkable tree.

There is a bombast to some of the Maquette's grander reveals that other games of the same ilk simply can't muster. Perhaps you yourself are standing in a diorama, and there might be a much larger diorama encasing whatever you've concluded to be normal-sized. Nearly all of Maquette's seven chapters are centered around that diorama, and within an hour of playing, the design team will ask you to explore the fringes of what this skewed reality implies. Sure enough, as I walked over to that location, I saw that a massive, golden key had fallen from the sky, serving as a makeshift bridge.Įvery puzzle in Maquette iterates on that concept: shrinking or expanding the scope of the map with the power of perspective. So, in an early puzzle, I picked up my normal-sized key and wedged it in between two pillars within the diorama. If I pick up the smaller key and chuck it somewhere else in the diorama, the regular sized key will appear at the same coordinates in the real world. If I'm carrying a key and drop it in a corner, a much smaller key will appear in the diorama. In the center of the pagoda is a diorama that mirrors the surrounding terrain on a much smaller scale. You find yourself deposed on a mystic pagoda, surrounded by steepled castles, haunted woods, and blooming gardens. In Maquette, you will move time and space to climb up a set of stairs.īefore we dig into all that, let's talk about Maquette's puzzles.

Maquette puzzle game