Maquette PS5 PS Plus Review
Maquette PS5 PS Plus Review
The First 48
Maquette, it sounds better than diorama or model but more importantly is it worth your time.
In the first 48 minutes of a game, you should be able to know enough about the game and even better, within the first 48 hours, you will know if the game has done enough to get its hooks into you. Everyone leads busy lives in some way or another these days and if you can figure out if a game is going to click with you or abandoned after 48 minutes then you can spend more time doing what you love.
We are now seeing a trend with PlayStation and more specifically PS Plus where the service is now getting brand new games on the day of the release. We saw it first on the PS5 with Bugsnax, and we have seen it again with Destruction All Stars and now the perspective puzzler Maquette.
Enjoying my time with other first person puzzle games like The Room and The Witness, Maquette seemed like it would fit right in and being published by Annapurna Interactive was a encouraging sign. Instantly, Maquette stands out from the rest by taking a different narrative path. Instead of trying to unravel some deep and dark mystery, you are trying to piece together memories of a young relationship.
Unlike other difficult puzzle games, Maquette does take advantage of the in game help system that PlayStation touted prior to the release of the PS5, which means that if you are stuck for a long period of time and feel like there is no way out, then the answer is just a click of the DualSense away.
Maquette is a French word for model, which is the core concept of the game. The puzzles require creative thinking by using the model system nested in another model and so on. Your first puzzle requires you to use the model town in front of you that is about half the size of your character. The pathway you need to go is blocked by a giant red cube that is about four times as big as your character, however moving it in the model also moves the larger cube from the door that you are now able to access.
One of my favourite design choices made by Graceful Decay was to put up glowing walls to the areas that aren’t a concern to you at the immediate moment. In many puzzle games or all games for that matter, sometimes you spend too much time wasted trying to solve something that is impossible at that time.
Early on in the game, I had a bridge model that I knew what to do with and where to put it in the model after I found it in the real world, but the games controls were fighting me the whole time, which became frustrating and eventually caused me to reconsider if what I was doing was right. I pulled up the help system on the PS5 and sure enough, what I was trying to do was the right thing except the controls were making it seem like I wasn't. The controls continue to be an issue for me as I feel like I am constantly fighting the button layout.
Maquette also features the vocal talents of Bryce Dallas Howard and Seth Gabel. The relationship is believable because they are actually married in real life and this creates authenticity that just can’t be replicated by actors. This connection is extremely important as the game is built around the puzzle and the relationship. Not executing on one of these aspects would have been very detrimental to Maquette.
Based on the speed on which the story advanced in the first 48 minutes, Maquette is a game that could be finished during a weekend sitting. Similar to games like The Witness, The Room and Superliminal there is no multiplayer in Maquette but sitting on the couch and binging wouldn’t be much different from something on Netflix. Obviously, being on PS Plus means that you should try this game for sure, but I will be coming back within the first 48 hours to try and finish it.
