Maquette ps5 review full#
This is the reward of a good puzzle - the aha! of personal pride - and in Maquette the moments you find the right bridge or ramp or change of relative size are often full of it. It's cleverly twisted and re-presented in slightly different forms, which I won't say how for risk of spoiling, but crucially its best puzzles reflect the old genre ideal of gradual education: puzzles as these kinds of multi-stage, compound equations, the game designer your own personal, one-to-one maths tutor who teaches you the foundation - guiding with ambient light and sound cues and line of sight - and then adds the next rule and the next until you're left to stand alone and apply everything you've learned at once. The brilliance of that basic principle lingers - hints of Superliminal here, I should say, which was secretly always about size but there's more emphasis on step-by-step logic here, and less on tricks of perception. Solving these puzzles is, mostly, a delight. Drifting away from the centre into the outer, gigantic sections of the world can feel strangely threatening, like drifing out to sea. There are rules that you could likely write down and utilise with greater precision (there are technically only three sizes of world to go between, for instance, thanks to some very clever architecture), but most of the time I just found myself muttering "make it big" or "I go small", or maybe "I go big, make it small, move small block, I go small, climb block, I go big", and so on.
The point is it's very clever, but also best not to think about too hard. Where things get really fun is when you start carrying things between these different replicas - taking regular-sized things into giant worlds, tiny sized things into regular ones, occasionally taking a very tiny sized thing into the regular world and dropping it like an idiot (like me), and so on. So pick up the little cube and drop it somewhere else, and - tada! - now the path where the big cube was is clear too. However, turn towards the little replica in the middle, and the cube is also in there, to scale, and therefore only about knee-height - small enough to be picked up. This is also where things become very difficult to put into words, so, one attempt at an example before I just give up and quickly move on: there's a giant red cube blocking your path in the medium-sized (normal-sized?) world, so giant it's too big to move. The puzzling comes, mostly, from the specific handful of objects that can be carried between these different replicas, and that appear in all of these worlds at once. Graceful Decay has mastered an aesthetic with Maquette, even ignoring the fact it's a debut. Back outside that first big outer dome I mentioned? An even bigger replica - and presumably on and on from there.
Inside that middle dome? An even more miniature replica.
Beneath that middle dome is a waist-high replica of the dome you're in: four puzzle areas, an even smaller dome in the middle. Beneath this giant dome are four gated puzzle areas arranged opposite each other, crossroads-like, and in the middle is another dome, this time only about two stories high. Each level, as such, occurs under a large, domed-roof structure, several stories high. Maquette is a recursive puzzler, primarily - another stylish, concept-heavy indie from arthouse publisher Annapurna Interactive - and the core is excellent. Availability: Out now on PC, PS4, and PS5.Watch on YouTube Maquette - gameplay walkthrough trailer Maquette review
0 kommentar(er)
