This version of the mind is built around systematic, puzzle-logic foundations rather than dreamy associative adventure. But the surreal poignancy that accompanies Kaufman’s work-its exploration of where strange and obsessive neuroses can take a person-is mostly absent. So too is there an uncanny drift that accompanies shrinking and navigating the comparatively mammoth architecture this edges towards Eternal Sunshine-the way Joel’s mind unnervingly slips away from itself. The scale of Maquette’s environments conjure a similar sense of uneasiness. Anyone who’s seen the latter will remember the cavernous theatre sets built by its protagonist that are so large and intricate as to rival real-life. This focus on interiority reminds me of Charlie Kaufman’s movies Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Synecdoche, New York. The result is a script, written by playwright Gracie Gardner, which often seems to just float without meaning what spell the game casts vanishes in these moments. Often, they end with an ellipsis (.), but by the time I’ve figured out what to do and discovered further text, I’ve forgotten what came before. Overcoming these obstacles, and the sheer time it takes, interrupts the flow of a story which maintains a conspicuous presence in the environment through the sentences scattered throughout. But this only happens after an infuriating twenty minutes culminating in me consulting the guide provided to reviewers. I can’t walk up the steps since, at this point, I’m the size of an ant instead I traverse a gentle diagonal at the side of it. Solutions can feel obtuse and overly specific, like positioning a staircase on its side to reach an inexplicably elevated house. However, issues surface as the puzzles ramp up in difficulty.
Progress is marked by further text-a continuation of Michael’s internal dialogue-and objects such as a fairground ticket which trigger ornate illustrated memories. A few minutes later, I do the same with a bridge, but make it bigger to traverse a gap.
The first few moments are straightforward enough a gigantic cube blocks a doorway so I pick up the smaller model version and drop it outside voila-the obstacle is gone. Thoughts from Michael appear in the scenery until I arrive at Maquette’s major setting-a dome positioned in a square flanked by four buildings styled on the city’s recognizable architecture. The game begins in a moonlit garden while Gabor Szabo’s jangly cover of 1967 hit “San Franicsan Nights'' plays in the background.
Maquette steers the visual style towards something more human if not necessarily emotionally resonant, asking us to navigate a labyrinth intended to reflect the mind itself. Take 2019’s Manifold Garden or 2017’s underrated Echo, two titles of similar infinite-feeling environments but which emphasize the eerie, computational qualities of such spaces. Still, this in itself represents a seemingly fresh twist on what is fast-becoming a recursive video game micro-genre. It starts out with a typically millennial meet-cute in a coffee shop from there-well, you can probably guess the rest.
Like What Remains of Edith Finch, personal drama is foregrounded alongside novel interactions, but you’ll find little of that game’s bite in this strait-laced story of a romance gone right and then wrong, voice-acted by real-life Hollywood couple Seth Gabel and Bryce Dallas Howard who play Michael and Kenzie. Now, ten years on, and presumably many thousands of hours of labor later, the result is the kind of highly polished, emotive, and seemingly artful video game that Maquette’s publisher Annapurna Interactive specializes in. An early version was showcased at the Game Developers Conference in 2011 despite a drab initial aesthetic, the demo’s recursive puzzles drew outbursts of applause from the audience even then, it represented around 100 hours of work for designer Hanford Lemoore. For San Francisco studio Graceful Decay, it’s the product of a notably long development.
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