Normally they’re centred around a brightly coloured Disney-esque dome, which slowly starts to crack and become less vivid as time wears on.
The game is divided into seven chapters, and each one puts you in a slightly different metaphorical space representing a stage in our lovers' relationship. Occasionally a partially animated cutscene of sketches will appear, offering a more tangible illustration of small but memorable events they’ve shared. As you continue to move through the world, more handwritten lines from their book scribble across the screen, filling us in on the couple's thoughts about mundane things like what they did for lunch that day to slightly more emotional topics like whether they're really meant to be together. We never see the characters on-screen, just hear their voices, listening in on choice moments of their past together. When the book is opened at the end of this scene, the action shifts to the first hub-like world and the tale goes back to the beginning of Kenzie and Michael's relationship, when they've just met each other. The game starts in a sprawling botanical garden at night, as scripted lines of Michael’s thoughts appear against the lovely background scenery as he recalls finding the old sketchbook he and Kenzie once shared back when they were together (just a little hint that things might not end up so well). They are both unsurprisingly brilliant in their roles, even if those roles are to play a saccharine-sweet cutesy couple that is sure to make anyone who’s been even slightly in love grimace. This story's “girl,” Kenzie, is performed by Bryce Dallas Howard of Jurassic World fame, whilst her real-life husband Seth Gabel plays the “boy,” Michael. You’ll probably recognise at least one of these voices. It's a simple tale we can probably all relate to: boy meets girl, boy and girl fall in love with each other, then. This, along with having to follow an overly annoying couple's story, left me feeling ready to break up and move on by the end. Unfortunately, there are too many puzzles that have too little explanation as to how they’re supposed to work, which starts to confuse matters. When the puzzles work, the world-within-a-world is a joy to explore and play with. Like a more romantically focused Superliminal, you must overcome physical obstacles by manipulating model-sized components to affect their life-sized counterparts in beautiful 3D settings whilst also changing your own perspective of your shifting relationship. Yet that's how Maquette, from developers Graceful Decay, plays out. Love can be many things, but the basis for a first-person recursive puzzle game is a new one.
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