2.5/5 ★ – pinksteady's review of Maquette.

A splendid puzzle game ruined by a pointless bolted-on story It seems a game is not a game anymore unless it comes with a tear-jerking emotional storyline of love and heartbreak. A puzzle game cannot simply be left to be a puzzle game. Solving a puzzle can no longer be its own reward, and must instead now be a metaphor for some aspect of a love story. And so it is with Maquette. At its core it is a surprisingly impressive and innovative 3D puzzle game. You exist within a ‘house’ that contains a number of buildings, and that house exists within a larger identical copy of it, and contains a smaller identical copy of it. Changes you make at one ‘layer’ are reflected in other layers, and by carrying objects between layers you can change the relative size of things and solve puzzles in really interesting out-of-the-box ways. It really is very good. Unfortunately, they went and ruined it by layering on a cheesy, uninteresting and predictably doomed love story. Every puzzle you solve presents another bit of cawny dialogue, chronicling the romance of two Americans. You never actually see them, you just hear them. And they are entirely unlikeable and uninteresting and what they see in each other is a mystery. The game mostly has no bearing on what is going on with this story, save some lightweight architectural changes to reflect their state of mind and some flowery animations here and there. This imposed and pointless narrative made me feel like I was being insulted as a gamer. Like, I’m not capable of just enjoying a game for what it is; I have to be given more ‘substance’. It’s like two completely different people merged two completely different ideas into one game - one was an innovative puzzle game, the other a boring short story. I just don’t understand why. Was Maquette found to be too boring as a pure puzzler during play testing? Was this really the vision of whoever conceived the core idea of the game? Maybe I’ll do some research and find out. Ultimately I found the story too annoying and imposing to allow me to just freely enjoy the game. I became irritated and was unable to shake the feeling off. This wasn’t helped by the odd game-breaking bug I encountered (I’d have to restart the level to fix), all of which I found to be well-discussed on forums. For these not to have been patched in a nearly year-old game I found kind of unacceptable.