MAQUETTE

Graceful Decay’s romantic recursive puzzler won’t be tied down

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Developer Graceful Decay

Publisher Annapurna Interactive Format PC Origin US

Release TBA

When you’re alone, the world seems made for two. Maquette’s fantastical environments are full of such mockery: parallel paths threading through twin archways, mirrored flowerbeds and fountains. The absence of somebody is felt, even before the story we’re following takes a wistful turn.

And we are, indeed, following it: much as in previous Annapurna-published walking sim What Remains Of Edith Finch, handwritten words melt into being on walls and in the air, leading the way. In wandering Maquette’s verdant gardens and lonely carnivals, you’re retracing the steps of a relationship. Recursive puzzles, meanwhile, speak to a different aspect of love affairs: how things that once seemed so small can become gigantic, world-altering fixtures in our lives.

As we carry around a curious cube, we’re put in mind of Manifold Garden; when we set it down in the centre of a diorama of the courtyard we’re currently standing in and hear it fall with a ceramic clunk behind us as a now much larger object, we think of Superliminal. But Maquette has existed as a prototype since 2011, when game designer and Graceful Decay founder