Richard Norris

Far far far better than it needed to be as a tech demo, an absolutely lovely little game! It's SO polished, every aspect of it is admirable! Sony would be missing a trick if they don't milk this for all it's worth, pushing Astro Bot as a mascot.

Came to this off the back of playing "The Witness", which might have coloured my perception of it somewhat, because that game was incredible. I only finished the first hub of Maquette, but I've seen enough to know I'm done. It's incredibly well put together, and if it tugs at heartstrings and wins awards, I will utterly 'understand', but the puzzles have all left me cold and I find the overly twee romance kind of grating. In the first hub, we meet a cool gimmick / puzzle mechanic that we're not explicitly introduced to with any wit, but through trial and error and there only being a single thing to interact with. Which is totally fine, I like a puzzle game that makes you play with it to see how it works. Except that the narrative elements are so curated, and so hand-held that control is frequently stolen from you to make you look at "the thing you are meant to look at". These two different styles really seem to grind against each other to me. There's a lot of fumbling in the dark trying to guess what the designer thought would be a cool solution to a puzzle, and then a lot of having your head held in place to be shown what they think is a cool story. It feels I have no real agency.