To this day, it seems insane to release a game that is short and barely repeatable. Well, Maquette encounters both problems, but in his case it is not used to deny all the good things he has. Because it’s a massive first person puzzle game that puts all the pieces together to tell a contemporary love story. One afternoon might be enough to finish it off, but it’s a very good way to spend the afternoon.
Graceful Decay produces this game that tells how Kenzie and Michael met and fell in love at some of the most important moments of their lives. But not in the form of an account, but with puzzle screens with a certain physical behavior system. The strangest thing is that you never see their faces because they rely on other narrative forms like conversation and looking through the eyes. It helps a lot that the performance is provided in English, the only language in the voice, by Bryce Dallas Howard (Jurassic World, Schwarzer Spiegel, Spider-Man 3) and Seth Gabel (Genius, Fringe, Nip / Tuck) who did it also are a few in the real world.
Maquette is one of those games that anyone can learn and play because all you have to do is get the hang of it to resize it. There are several objects that can be made much larger or much smaller. If you use this quality and interact with the scenarios, you will have to move from one room to another. You can pick up or move some of these parts, especially if they are tiny. However, it is not that certain objects change their appearance, but that there is a small version of the same world within the world that is easier to touch and that reacts symmetrically.
There is one situation that serves as a perfect example and is just as valid as watching our gameplay video. You must enter a floating house with the door closed and that is on the other side of a cut. We have a key that opens the lock and we can use it as a bridge too if we can make it huge. But in that case, how will it get through the keyhole? The solution is to get even smaller with the key in hand, open the door in the tiny world so that it opens in the real one, and then let it grow until it serves to open onto the other To get to the page where the open door is already waiting. It is a very skilled mechanic who is used over and over again.
This is the main problem with puzzles. Although it may surprise you at first, and it takes a few minutes to get to your head where to shoot, gradually get used to it and it repeats itself over and over again. What is presented to you hardly varies.
In addition to this beautiful story that has been well told and its puzzles, Maquette includes a high quality soundtrack that is visually incredible. The scenarios are very rare, but they have so much sweetness and color and are so different from the usual ones that it is difficult not to find the taste in any corner. Usually a very pleasant ambient melody accompanies you on your way until suddenly one of the indie music tracks breaks out with a singer to accentuate the gameplay and lead Maquette to her best moments.
A sensational preparation that you can run through without stopping, because it is still a running simulator with physics-based puzzles and a wonderful staging. You go from one point to another, big or small, repeating the trick of shrinking or growing. Something new has to happen or a dialogue has to be skipped to regain your full attention.
The more you abuse resizing to find the solution to a puzzle, the more this problem becomes worse, as tiny beings have a very long way to go and once you get to it, it is not all that entertaining for a being of these dimensions Have got used to the surprise of the first few times, to the fact that everything around you is exaggerated. The more you walk aimlessly, the closer you are to boredom. It would have been a disaster in a 10 or 15 hour game, but it’s not an ordeal in this short game.
For what it costs, which is roughly fifteen dollars, it can be considered an afternoon hobby. This little indie that amplifies beauty and emotion has a sensational look and makes a very good first impression, although difficult to vary and when it ends what is early it has already stepped into the repetition. Graceful Decay created a very brilliant mechanic for Maquette, he has to know how to give it a development.
