Maquette

Pros:

- Not a bad idea with the layout of the game world inside the game world and manipulating the size of the objects on which the core gameplay is built in solving puzzles (although something similar was already in Superliminal)
- Cool OST that you want to listen again apart from the game and add some songs to your favorites
- Hollywood voice actors for the main off-screen characters: Bryce Dallas Howard (Jurassic World, Black Mirror) and Seth Gable (The Da Vinci Code, Billions). The acting was really great.

Minuses:

- The plot is rather boring (the story of the meeting, love and separation of two young people) and does not touch your feelings at the end of the game, and people who have experienced the traumatic experience of parting will most likely be contraindicated in general
- The game visually looks poor, sometimes even hacky, and all because of the bias in the low-poly style. Although here they tried to get out as much as possible due to art direction and some effects, this moment can be further improved.
- A whole bunch of bugs: from flying objects over the terrain and control glitches to bugs that block the walkthrough and generate game crashes. It is not clear what 10 people from QA in the credits and Annapurna itself were doing. This makes the game feel raw and unfinished.
- In places, completely idiotic and illogical puzzle solutions that you can get stuck on for a long time and eventually have to go on YouTube (key-size manipulation puzzle near the end of the game as a perfect example of bad game design). I do not recommend playing on a tired evening.

Summary: this is a game that seems to be made specifically for PS Plus and Xbox Game Pass subscribers to make the catalog of available games look larger. I do not advise spending money (even at a discount) on it. Very weak in terms of story and puzzle gameplay.

This game is just so frustrating and boring that it hardly feels like it was worth making. Maquette has a cool idea, you interact with a toy display of a map in a central area and things you put on that transfer to the main overworld map and vice versa and you go through various layouts of this main hub and solve puzzles to continue progressing. Only the problem is, this works better on paper, most of these puzzles are either too easy and require little thought, or just too convoluted and just require tons of backtracking and trial and error. Maquette isn't so much clever as it is trial and error as it doesn't require thinking so much as it does exploring and messing around with things. Plus the game is also a little buggy and has issues with getting stuck. The story of Maquette isn't really that interesting eithers, its basically a man reflecting on a failed relationship. Maquette isn't too long either, maybe around 4 hours and it just feels like a waste of potential. What could have been a cool puzzle game ends up being a boring and frustrating trial and error game with too much backtracking.

man what is it with indie developers and thinking 'story about a relationship that went sour narrated by the man' is in any way unique or subversive

Like, okay, I'll give the game some things. The art direction is gorgeous — a core and actually distinct theme in this otherwise trite story is that both parties involved are artists and view the world through the lens of art and while the conversations themselves don't have a lot of worth (i want a fridge that's sideways instead of vertical because i'm quirky xd! this is the part in the story where we're deliriously happy with one another so that when juxtaposed with the very next chapter when we hate each other and break up this'll ring as bittersweet in hindsight) the visual of the drawing slowly coming together was mesmerizing and really did sell me on the game's art direction. I also was interested in the central conceit of the gameplay — messing with the maquette to make objects bigger or smaller, breaking through the boundary of the world to make _yourself_ smaller is conceptually interesting, but in practice, the game doesn't teach you any of its mechanics which made me have to check the walkthrough frequently to know where the puzzle even was and to see what obscure mechanic from two chapters ago was being brought back and many of the solutions themselves were wrought with slowness, tedium, and brute-forcing against the game's physics engine until things arbitrarily worked. Always frustrating, never really fun.

I would've maybe given this game a borderline pass if one of its aspects really worked beyond the conceptual level, overall, but between a story that's not as distinct as it thinks it is and puzzle gameplay that should work more than it actually does, art design and presentation are only barely enough to stop this game from being bad.