That’s not to say there aren’t hints at some unity between the gameplay experience and the narrative. But this is a small story that knows it’s a small story, and it’s all the better for it. A game that tries to tackle intimate, human topics always runs the risk (perhaps mechanically appropriate, in this case) of being up its own ass. Thankfully, Graceful Decay already seems confident enough to let those small moments bear the weight of the story. There’s a great understanding of the little aspects of relationships, good and bad, that shines through even in the brief time we spend with the characters. The performances are solid, giving the quiet moments in the writing a chance to shine. But there are also brief animated interludes where the two characters are fully voiced by real-life spouses Bryce Dallas Howard and Seth Gabel. Most of what you encounter on this front is text-lines from a letter from one half of the couple to the other-that appears in the environment, akin to What Remains of Edith Finch. Tying together the puzzles is a loose narrative about two people meeting and falling in love in San Francisco. It’s weird in a way that forces your mind to adjust to new possibilities, and it’s the sort of thing that you could only ever experience in a video game.
Though I do have a few issues with the puzzles themselves-quite a bit more on that soon enough-the idea has all of the instant magic that made Portal such a blast. It’s a bit mind-bending and difficult to put into words, so it may help to watch a quick trailer, if you’re having a hard time following.īecause the concept is so interesting, and because it works how you expect, Maquette can devise puzzles around it by only adding a few other interactions: flipping switches, picking up objects, rotating them, and dropping them. You can even change your own size, relative to your surroundings, by moving in or out of the recursions. If you pick up an object and place it in the miniature, it’ll drop into the full-scale environment, only much larger. Most of the environments you explore are nested, with a smaller version at the center of the larger one, and vice versa. Its big gimmick-and I don’t mean that in a disparaging way-is recursion.
Based on the early trailers, it felt like exactly that sort of game. To be honest, that was the reason I was excited to review Maquette, the debut title from indie studio Graceful Decay. After the runaway success of Valve’s 2007 title, developers big and small took the formula and ran with it: Come up with one mind-bending gimmick, and use it to put players through a gauntlet of puzzling fun. If there’s any genre I’m sad to see in decline, it’s puzzle games in the tradition of Portal.
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