That’s still the primary way you interact in Maquette: Pick things up and put them down. It’s only a fun simulation if you can pick things up.” “I just had this world-within-a-world simulation running. It’s like the difference between having a character that can jump and having an entire level with obstacles and goals,” Lemoore told me over a Zoom call recently. “How this game came about is, first, you build the recursion engine, the recursion simulation, and that’s not even a game at that point. So you’d pick up a key - one of the few objects at your disposal - and drop it over the chasm in the diorama. In the normal-sized world, you’d come across a chasm, one you wouldn’t have a triple jump or a jetpack or any other video game tool of that nature to help you cross. Traditionally, in video games, keys unlock doors, right? But in that initial prototype, a key served as a bridge. There was also a puzzle involving a chasm and a key. Pick up and move the cube in the diorama, and the cube will move identically in the normal-sized world, allowing you passage. Inside a central building, you’d see a small diorama - a maquette - of that exact walled city. In 2011 Lemoore showed it off at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, where Kotaku received a firsthand look.Įrstwhile Kotaku EIC Stephen Totilo described a “game in which the only thing you can do is pick things up and put them down” that left him “in awe.” You could freely explore a walled city, wherein one passageway was blocked by a giant red cube. Maquette spent about a decade in the oven. I also wanted to know if I could squish myself. Were I to review the game, the whole text would amount to, simply, “Play it.” But I wanted to know more, and to learn more, and to tell you more, so I hit up Hanford Lemoore, the game’s creator, director, and lead engineer, to get the full story. I’ve played a lot of wonderful games while working at Kotaku, but none have resonated with me as much as Maquette, a first-person “recursive puzzle game” released this month for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, and PC.
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