So, the story is atrocious, what about the gameplay? Well, the gameplay is where all of the original thoughts went into. All I can think of is Bryce Dallas Howard and Seth Gabel reading the script before laughing at it with their Hollywood friends, look guys if we want more big actors to be in games, we can’t be giving them scripts like this. It even gets kind of confusing at one point, how do you tell a story like this in a confusing way. The terrible narrative takes centre way too often, you’re doing some pretty fun puzzles but now you’re punished by the dreadful dialogue. It seems to want to touch on some themes like individualism but fails to do so in any meaningful way. The gameplay mechanic is so separate from the narrative that you feel like you’re just playing puzzles as mummy and daddy argue in the background. Ok, so you have bad chemistry between the two leads and bad writing, please tell me that’s it. Again, this is coming from somebody who likes romances. So, you get no chemistry between the leads, but at least the writing is good, right? WRONG! Yeah, it can be mildly charming at points but most of the time I felt like I was going to throw up and that’s coming from someone who likes romances, the dialogue doesn’t sound like something real people say, imagine Anakin and Padmé’s dialogue in Star War but like ten times worse, I was happy when they started to argue because at least I didn’t have to listen to them talk about how much they wove each other. Anyway, yeah, the characters are voiced by a real married couple, if anyone should have chemistry its them, unless of course they recorded separately from each other which would be such a baffling decision for a romance. Ok, so it’s a story of the rise and fall of a relationship, you said everything has a caveat, what’s the caveat here? Where do I start? For a start Kenzie and Michael don’t have much chemistry which is baffling considering that they’re voiced by real life married couple Bryce Dallas Howard and Seth Gabel, yeah, we have real movie actors in this which is basically unheard of for an indie game, I know the game is being published by Annapurna Interactive who are essentially the kings of weird artsy indie games so it was probably their weird artsy money that got the actors but still it’s weird to see. As we move between different points in their life together, we get to visit the locations described but in a surrealist, infinitely repeating environment (I’ll explain it more when I discuss the gameplay). Maquette tells the story of a relationship which fell apart, the story is told by Michael who is writing to his ex-lover Kenzie, it’s a good enough excuse for us to hear the important parts of their life together as he explains how he felt during key parts of said relationship. The problem is everything has a caveat, there is nothing this game does well that it doesn’t also ruin in some way. Maquette has a lot of value, that’s something I can’t say for the majority of games released, it has a clear, unique gameplay mechanic and a story it wants to tell, it has gorgeous visuals and a bopping soundtrack. This will be spoiler free I have way too much work and other articles in progress to do a full dissection of this game, this is a normal review which you can read all the way through to see if the game is for you or not, you know, how most people write reviews. Let me rephrase that, I’m not sure if I’d recommend spending the £15 it is on Steam for it, I got it for free on PlayStation Plus so if you can get it there then go ahead, Maquette is at least interesting, just not £15 interesting. Maquette had the potential to be a masterpiece, it just fumbled in so many areas that I’m not even sure if I’d recommend you play it. Originality is so hard to find in video games that when you find some and it disappoints you it hurts way more than any truly dreadful game could. It is easy to laugh at a game with no original ideas in it because you can’t imagine a game like that being anything special but when you see a game with original ideas that it doesn’t fully utilise it just gets depressing. Well, that’s probably not technically true, predatory microtransactions and selling your data is probably worst but you know what I mean. The worst thing a game can do is underutilise great ideas. I have typed the word ‘maquette’ into Google so many times now for research and the likes that Google just switched my language to French, nothing to do with the review, just thought it was funny.
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