Title: Maquette
Developer: Graceful Decay
Publisher: Annapurna Interactive
Release Date: 3/2/2021 (PS/PC), 5/25/2023 (NS), 7/19/2023 (XB)
Spoilers for Maquette ahead.
Maquette is a 2021 indie walking simulator that tells the story of an artsy upper-middle-class Bay Area couple, Kenzie (Bryce Dallas Howard) and Michael (Seth Gabel), from the birth of their relationship to its (maybe inevitable?) end. It is also an environmental puzzle game, featuring endlessly-recursive levels, neat architecture and a mechanic that makes objects bigger or smaller depending on what level of recursion you’re on. Unfortunately, the story isn’t compelling at all, the mechanics are (in my view) underutilized, and as a whole, what we do in the game feels very disconnected from what we’re told is happening in Michael and Kenzie’s lives from moment to moment.
The story of Maquette takes place primarily in written snippets and blurbs of spoken dialogue in the background while the player solves simple incidental puzzles in the foreground. Gameplay is limited to using the recursive nature of the environment to manipulate the size of various objects; these objects can then be used primarily as keys and bridges to move on to the next bit of story. A lot of care was clearly given to the environment designs themselves so that they could work both as a tiny 3D maquette – a small scale model used by architects to sketch out ideas – and as massive, cavernous environments that stretch out as far as the eye can see. Theoretically, a player could walk endlessly through an environment that is forever getting bigger around them; practically, there’s no real incentive to do this, and indeed there are some limitations on how big or small you can make certain objects and still be able to manipulate them.
There are lots of reasons to be clinically interested in this game. It’s a neat little puzzle-object to take apart. The recursion really is interesting, following in the footsteps of games like Superliminal and Manifold Garden. In the abstract, a manufactured theme park of just-so houses colored like Wes Anderson movies is a pretty good metaphor for a relationship with nothing going on behind its facade. I didn’t mind the drawn art as it popped up, but I thought the game’s overall aesthetic played it too safe, like the 3D indie game equivalent of that overly corporate art style – “Alegria,” I think it’s called. I read an interview with the game’s director, Hanford Lemoore, where he confided that he’d wanted to make a video game about a guy being held in a recursive prison by an evil wizard. I have to admit, that sounds a lot more appealing to me than what we have here.
Here’s the thing: I don’t care about Kenzie and Michael at all. I think their voice actors are doing a fine job pretending to be in a strained relationship together (made less difficult by the fact that Dallas Howard and Gabel are in fact married), but there’s nothing for onlookers like you and me to latch onto here. Why does Kenzie like Michael, and vice versa? They met in a San Francisco coffee shop where Kenzie noticed Michael’s sketchbook and did a little doodle in it. They exchanged some pleasantries, but where’s the spark? Why am I supposed to be surprised or intrigued when, three or four chapters later, their little world is crumbling, falling apart at the seams? Of course it is, it was built on the flimsiest of pretenses, as far as we can see! But I think I could have withstood all of that if the game had bothered to say even one thing interesting about this relationship’s ultimate demise.
As we see, the couple grew apart over time, and things finally snapped when Michael couldn’t be fucked to have some care about whether Kenzie had just returned from work or school one day. A mundane argument for a mundane relationship between two mundane characters resulting in an equally mundane breakup. This shatters Michael’s world, apparently — even though he broke up with her — and results in the game’s least-interesting levels: a mazeless “labyrinth” with no puzzle to interact with whatsoever followed by a loose string of crumbling platforms floating in a void. We eventually return to the Maquette, now almost completely destroyed, where we fiddle with one or two more puzzles before reaching the end of the game: a cordial conversation between the two before Kenzie moves to the East Coast, and an acknowledgement from Michael that, now that he’s actually written everything down, he doesn’t really need to send this letter.
Oh, right. That part. Maquette is structured around the composition of one last “closure letter” Michael is planning to send to Kenzie some time after they have broken up. The story is told entirely from his perspective, overemphasizes Kenzie’s “quirks” while downplaying his own foibles, and frames the relationship falling apart in such a way as to imply that it’s totally her fault, but that he’s okay with it now and really it’s no big deal.
These are things I’m actively frustrated with the game about, but I don’t really think they would have been as big of an issue for me if I had any reason to give a shit about a couple that exists in the hundreds of thousands in the Bay Area and other major urban centers along both coasts, if we’re being honest. It’s like the game asked me to get invested in a relationship between a couple of hedge fund managers or “creatives” that work for Google or something. And that’s the worst part: we don’t even get to see the kind of tumultuous nonsense that startup tech bros get up to here.
I realize that very little of this is fair or charitable to the game itself. The act of playing it is mostly frictionless, aside from a couple of mildly incomprehensible puzzles, weak movement and an even weaker jump. But I can’t help but feel antipathy here. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with “I fell in love with a person, we dated, we moved in together, we grew apart, I broke up with her, I got a little bit upset, and then I got better.” There are no stakes here. There is no inherent drama. We learn nothing about the nature of love or romance here. There’s no emotional lows from which we might gain some kind of catharsis, some emotional triumph later on. And that sucks!
Relationships can be hard sometimes. Ending them can feel even worse. There is very little about falling in and then eventually out of love with someone that is very much fun. It can be isolating and scary to devote an appreciable chunk of your life to someone only for that chunk to amount to naught when the relationship comes to a close. To suddenly be unmoored from a harbor hitherto believed to be safe. I’ve been caught in the throes of depressions that lasted for years after being broken up with; I’ve also been that person who has broken up with someone without attempting to reconcile the relationship. I think there’s value in telling stories similar to Maquette, where relationships fall apart and don’t get put back together. I think it’s healthy to talk about that possibility – that eventuality – in any relationship. But I don’t really think this game gets there. I think Maquette squanders its pretty visuals and interesting game design ideas on the least-interesting version of this kind of story. And that’s maybe the most heartbreaking part of it all.
