Maquette — the new puzzle game proves problematic

Maquette has all the makings of my favourite kind of game. It boasts a gorgeous pastel-shaded aesthetic, the backing of top indie publisher Annapurna and an ingenious central mechanic that asks players to solve puzzles across nested dioramas, like a jigsaw made from Russian dolls. To top it off, all this is framed within a tender story of young love. Yet when I played the game last week, I was disappointed that it lacked the elegance of the infinity mirrors and Fabergé eggs that it evokes. Its clockwork is out of joint.

Dedicated puzzle games such as Maquette are an enduringly popular genre, while elements of puzzles often nestle within other games, such as action and role-playing titles. In a sense, a puzzle is when a game is most itself: not imitating the narrative of a novel, the music of an album or the spectacle of a blockbuster film. Puzzles are games doing something that only they can do, asking the player a question and leaving them to deduce the answer. 

It is in puzzles that the ingenuity of game designers truly shines. These can be brilliantly simple, such as the evergreen block-stacker Tetris, or as mind-meltingly devious as Baba Is You, which asks players to manipulate the syntax of word-blocks to change the rules governing each level. Such games understand the immense pleasure we draw from problem-solving. They do not feel the need to shoehorn in a storyline, just as sudokus don’t rely on serialised romance or cliffhangers to keep players returning to the newspaper each day.

Some puzzle games do successfully tell stories, however. The influential 1993 PC game Myst was an early hit, inviting players to explore a mysterious island and learn its secrets through a series of interrelated puzzles. Japanese titles such as Ghost Trick and the Professor Layton series set their challenges within compelling storylines with charming characters. Modern classic Portal and its sequel are a masterclass in design, with inventive puzzles (referenced in Maquette’s use of mise en abyme) and a memorable storyline that introduces one of gaming’s all-time greatest villains: the wily, witheringly sarcastic robot GLaDOS. 

Perhaps the most inspired puzzle-maker in gaming is auteur designer Jonathan Blow, whose 2008 title Braid explored themes of memory by allowing the player to manipulate the flow of time, while 2016’s The Witness was more oblique, suggesting that meaning is made not from an auxiliary storyline, but in discovering the elemental puzzles that hide in the world around us, waiting to be observed and solved.

Maquette’s art style is a gorgeous bath of soft hues and dappled light, offering the player bejewelled keys, glittering crystals and golden tickets

With this impressive lineage to draw from, I had high hopes for Maquette. It has been in development for 10 years, and sits in the lineage of first-person puzzles (such as Myst, The Witness, and Call of the Sea) and recursive puzzles (such as Manifold Garden and A Fisherman’s Tale). The central idea is undeniably brilliant: you explore a series of fantastical castles, gardens and fairgrounds around a scarlet dome, at the centre of which is a small scale model of your environment, the titular maquette. When you manipulate items in the maquette, the bigger world around you changes accordingly. The puzzles are solved by exploiting this mechanic — drop a marble into the maquette and a great boulder thunks into existence behind you. At first, the game’s mechanical imagination is positively exhilarating.

Maquette’s art style is a sumptuous bath of soft hues and dappled light, offering the player bejewelled keys, glittering crystals and golden tickets, items that feel freighted with symbolic meaning. Meanwhile a bold, somewhat sentimental soundtrack attempts to root players in the game’s story, which narrates the slow kindling and eventual dissolution of a relationship between two American hipsters. This is where the game falls apart: in contrast to its lyrical, luminous and deft visual style, the writing and characterisation are leaden and predictable, voice-acted like a school theatre production. I was shocked to learn that the lovers are played by a real-life couple, actors Seth Gabel and Bryce Dallas Howard, given their total lack of chemistry.

As the story falls flat, other parts of the game come apart. Despite the clever conceit, individual puzzles can be frustratingly obscure, forcing me to consult online guides for help. A good puzzle should not contain extraneous details, and it should teach you organically to use its systems — the game fails on both counts. But most of all I wanted Maquette to operate as a poignant metaphor for a relationship, to explore how being in love shifts our perspective, making us lose our sense of proportion, leaving us lost among the fantasy worlds we project on the walls of our minds. Instead, it resolves as a shimmering backdrop to a bland love story, a puzzle whose pieces never quite fit together

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