Maquette Review (Centurion902)
This game is a mixed bag, and honestly not one I would recommend to anyone I actually liked.
First, the good:
- It's beautiful, and has nice animations and music to go along with the pretty visuals.
Now the bad:
- The puzzles are trivial for the most part.
- Most puzzle mechanics are one and done. The crystals used to open doors exist for a single level before disappearing entirely. At no point does the game seriously make an attempt to challenge the player by mixing the mechanics, or adding greater complexity to existing mechanics such as more than 1 level of nesting to the Maquette.
- Puzzles mostly boil down to, resize the thing, use it as a bridge, then get to the maguffin.
- Player movement is fairly slow which is alright at normal scale but painful at small scale. A sprint button would be appreciated.
- Options involving multiple different nested maquettes are ignored.
- The story is mediocre, but fails to meaningfully connect with the puzzle solving you are actually doing.
Now, the ugly:
- The player character handles like dead fish. Controls for picking things up and dropping them fail to give you much precision, while forcing a slow mode on you during placement. When running into a wall with an object, the game will attempt to maintain the distance you have selected between yourself and the object by turning your view around.
- Bugs. In the final level, attempting to pick up the maquette while standing on it, or on the lip will result in an instant crash.
- The timed puzzle has a chance of completely bugging out and not opening the door requiring a level reset to try and make progress.
- The key resizing puzzle can cause confusion due to small keys sinking into the floor of the very large room that the maquettes are mirroring. Combined with the poor lighting in the room, it can make it close to impossible to to find the key in the room.
In summary: The game is pretty and well acted, but has no depth, few good puzzles, clunky controls, and weak integration between the story and the game-play. The game has multiple bugs, some of which are not immediately obvious to the player which completely lock off progression.
Not recommended.