MAQUETTE PS5 REVIEW HOW TO

It’s this that promotes the progress and pushing forward to uncover what their relationship was like. Solve each building’s puzzle and some more of the story of what happened between Kenzie (played by Bryce Dallas Howard) and Michael (Seth Gabel) will be revealed. Combining all these elements let’s you solve the various challenges placed in your path, and though they’re not overly frequent, they need some thinking about. This serves a few purposes and derives the puzzle gameplay – you can use it to “grow and shrink” objects by plucking them out of the miniture, or placing them in you can manipulate pathways and you can exit the model into the larger world, effectively making yourself smaller. It’s brain melting stuff if you try to apply logic. Get the angle right when moving things around and you can see the actions taking place around you… and realise that those actions are taking place in a larger world above where you are in the maquette. Change something in the model and it’s reflected in the outside world. Enter the central hall and you’ll find a recreation of the layout in model form in the centre that you’re able to interact with. Each level (for want of a better term) is dominated by a hall like building in the centre with four offshoots containing buildings that are not immediately accessible. I need to stress that because it was one of the biggest surprises I had going into Maquette – there’s less of the puzzle element than you expect, especially with the layout of the areas. The crux of the game is first person exploration in relatively linear environments with a touch of puzzle solving. It might seem like a strange point to highlight, it just struck me as a way to engage more with the audience and make this more personal for than simply wandering around differing landscapes on someone else’s nostalgia trip. In a really nice touch, there is no gender bias presented, and you’re able to interpret the actions you’re taking as belonging to either side of the relationship.

MAQUETTE PS5 REVIEW HOW TO

As the player you’re left exploring a strange setup with locked doors and impassable walkways that need some imagination and patience to figure out how to access and slowly reveal what’s happened in the real lives of our protagonists. This setup mirrors the tale being told in that there are synergies between the two where the visuals bring the audio into focus, but don’t share enough in common to remain connected.

Maquette is interesting in that it has two distinct personalities – an audio layer that tells the story of a couple that meet and start a relationship, and a visual layer dominated by the titular maquette which contains the world it’s set in. Will it be a model game for a physics puzzler, or end up only a sketched outline of what it could have been? Pulling in some Hollywood talent doesn’t hurt its chances of leaving an impression, though there’s a question on whether it can balance a melancholy tale against an imaginative take on reality.

This gameplay idea has been experimented with before in the likes of Superliminal and, more noticeably, A Fisherman’s Tale, but Maquette is looking at taking it a stage further.

Shifting the expectations of size, scale and shape in a recursive world, it’s aiming to tell a grounded Human tale using a perspective challenging mechanic.

Not getting much fanfare before release, Maquette is an intriguing take on the puzzle genre from Graceful Decay and Annapurna Interactive.

Maquette ps5 review