I played an hour or so this morning, will do more later. I love, love the mechanics in play and can see great potential in them but the "story" being told is a huge turn off. Like, it's clearly a somewhat personal story and I appreciate that but it's a quite offputting to be playing this clever puzzle adventure game and then have to listen to two people dating for some reason. Maybe that attitude will change, I don't know. It's just weird.
Yeah I find the jukebox soundtrack a little off-putting too. Sure it's an interesting mix of music and I get what they were trying to do, but I like these types of games to have an original and minimalist ambient score to add to the atmosphere. It feels like all subtlety is lost and as such I don't get that feeling of immersion like I have in other games in this genre. Less is more. But the puzzle mechanics are really fun.
Played a few hours on PS5. Kind of disappointed — it's a beautiful game, runs (mostly) well, and has solid voice acting and an incredible premise, but other than the initial "wow" factor of its design, the puzzles start to grate in terms of the minutae and the story starts to lay it on a bit thick. The latter I can take, but the former is a problem as I'm a lover of puzzle games and this one isn't quite nailing it for me. Solutions too often feel incredibly inflexible despite the seemingly open-ended recursive design of the world, and so you're very rarely rewarded by the game for coming up with a smart solution and instead spend a bit too much time figuring out the right sequence of events they had planned for the player to follow. When it works it feels great, but when it doesn't it's decidedly hollow and unsatisfying.
I'll definitely see it through to the end and the game has plenty of time I'd imagine to be more impressive with its core concept, but this is pretty clearly 7/10 territory for me.
I liked what I played so far, but I feel like I am fighting the physics way more than I should be while playing it. Makes the experience pretty frustrating sometimes.
I played a little bit of it last night. The puzzles are fun so far, kinda feel like Ant Man shrinking and enlarging stuff. The story I could do without. The dialogue comes across as overly saccharine and the picture of love it's trying to sell is too idyllic to feel realistic or even modern. Judging by the shift in setting, the point where I stopped is where the relationship starts to come apart so maybe it picks up from here.
The controls are straight forward enough that it should be. But it'll largely come down to how well they wrap their head around the way the puzzles work in the game. If they have a grasp on that then it should be pretty easy to play.
The controls are straight forward enough that it should be. But it'll largely come down to how well they wrap their head around the way the puzzles work in the game. If they have a grasp on that then it should be pretty easy to play.
I have no idea what I'm doing, I feel like the game didn't tell me anything. I got a trophy for solving a puzzle by changing something's size but I didn't do anything but pick up a cube.
My experience on PS5 so far has been stuttering, obtuse puzzles, hipster radio (some good tracks but I can certainly see people not liking a lot of it), and gagworthy indie filmschool love story writing.
Some pretty visuals and good voice acting at least.
The game is interesting but not sure how to feel yet. Some of the early puzzles took me longer than they should have but think I've wrapped my head around the mechanics now.
I think the onboarding could have been better since I could see players getting stuck very early on and theres nothing prompting you what to look for. Puzzle games have generally got good at intuitively introducing new mechanics but I think that's something Maquette struggles with. It throws a lot of potential areas to look at all at once and it's easy to get distracted or miss the 1 very specific solution that they intend. The general idea feels like its ripe for multiple solutions but so far, that hadn't borne out.
The overall writing is rough but its salvaged by the performances, and some good music choices.
My experience on PS5 so far has been stuttering, obtuse puzzles, hipster radio (some good tracks but I can certainly see people not liking a lot of it), and gagworthy indie filmschool love story writing.
Some pretty visuals and good voice acting at least.
Oh, you can't skip cutscenes. Realized that when I ran into a soft lock, hit restart thinking it'd bring me to start of the most recent puzzle but it went to the start of the entire segment. Easy enough to speed through knowing the solutions but better checkpointing would have been nice, rather than relying on the save/load options I just noticed.
Yeah, I don't like that restarting a puzzle means starting from the beginning of the "level". At the moment I'm halfway considering a refund. In the second level it seems way too easy to softlock yourself.
My experience on PS5 so far has been stuttering, obtuse puzzles, hipster radio (some good tracks but I can certainly see people not liking a lot of it), and gagworthy indie filmschool love story writing.
Some pretty visuals and good voice acting at least.
yeah don't want to be harsh, but pretty much this.
also no idea why there is a texture quality setting lol. like does it affect performance or something?
came across the pedestrian while dealing with this. that turned out to be pretty good puzzler
I genuinely can't handle this fucking writing, both the leads are absolutely intolerable. The puzzles are cool (but not nearly cool enough given the concept), and it looks nice, but the forced 'cutscenes' with awful dialogue make it hard to enjoy.
I genuinely can't handle this fucking writing, both the leads are absolutely intolerable. The puzzles are cool (but not nearly cool enough given the concept), and it looks nice, but the forced 'cutscenes' with awful dialogue make it hard to enjoy.
I don't dislike this style of music but... I would like something more dynamically adapted to the game, not just throw some random songs every now and then.
played until the second level and I really enjoy this on my PS5. I am also looking forward to see more of the story. What is a godsend here, are the video helps through the cards with PSplus. Amazing implantation like with Bugsnax
You have asked that in the reviwew thread as well yet I still wonder why when there is no such setting - as others have set, there's only FOV (60 to 90 I believe) and for whatever strange reason texture quaily (low/med/high).
Not having 60 fps or even a stable framerate on PS5 is somewhat disaspointing.
So the stuttering on PS5 was painful so grabbed this on Steam.
Strange thing is that there aren't any texture quality settings on PC lol. Bizarre.
Anyway if anyone else has decided to pick this up on PC I'm pleased to say that you can disable the (frankly, annoying) use of motion blur and bloom. Just go in regedit and search for:
It is a bit disappointing, a few levels in. In part from being able to enter apparently unwinnable states (without reloading) multiple different ways which seem like bugs, and from it being level-based and linear. One time I got stuck it was from needing to go somewhere that was previously blocked off by an invisible wall that looked like it would sensibly always be there.
Having played A Fisherman's Tale, a game in a recursive world where you can see the recursion more (and in VR!), the impact of that is lessened too.
But it is OK otherwise and it will probably get better as it goes on, as long as there aren't more unwinnable states/bugs. Have lower expectations than I started to have and it will be better too.
Almost certain that I'm physically stuck near the end of the 2nd part of the game and I really don't want to restart the whole section, which seems to be my only solution.
I'm at the part where you get the cog in that sandy area. As you walk out with it a big wall appears around the central, miniaturized area. You can go back where you came from and look through a tiny hole near the back wall to see the other side of that walled off area. I figured I could throw the red orb over the wall, control it through this window to deactivate the gate. Well, I threw it too far to the right and can't see it. I also can't jump over the wall. The game won't let you jump on top of the blocks. So I'm stuck. I think - unless I'm missing something - that my only option is to restart, which means doing all the red/blue/aquamarine block puzzles again. I don't want to do that.
Finished up getting the platinum trophy just now (yeah, it's a pretty short game and a straightforward trophy list).
As others have said, it's very much a 7/10 sort of game. It just doesn't have the breadth of ideas to sustain a full game and the narrative (gratingly twee at first but improved later on) just doesn't gel with the puzzle game; it's like two completely unrelated aspects squished together.
I'd repeat my earlier recommendation for people to try Superliminal for a game that's both more clever and mind-bending mechanically, but also better narratively.
All said though, I'm glad I played it and I think it's a worthwhile freebie.
I've been really enjoying the game so far. Some of the puzzles get truly devious in the ways you have to think about space and size, it's clever. There are a few jumps in logic but overall I'm having fun.
The story is nice, and honestly as unique as the puzzle mechanics are, the love story is the heart of wanting to go through this game for me. I can't help but love following an arc like this. The acting is good, and the writing is mostly solid. There's points that resonate with me quite a lot with how it feels to be falling in love with someone. Though I do feel like the moments with the characters are still a little sparse. The puzzle factor is fun but ends up feeling a bit too disconnected from the story of Michael and Kenzie. I work at a puzzle for like 15 minutes in silence then get a snippet of (admittedly charming) dialogue. We're moving through months of their relationship but without that much narrative quite yet (on the fourth chapter now) to really give me a better feel for what their relationship is. The scenes feel just a bit too sparse.
And, while the dialogue feels genuine, a lot of the written entries we read feel like they are *telling* me about emotions rather than showing me. A lot of lines feel like they say something like "I loved being around you. Your quirks were always so fun" and I'd much rather the game show me her quirks, show me these moments more.
With all that said, I'm quite enjoying my time here. The core concept is very clever, and despite my quibbles I think that the relationship story is nice and fairly natural to go through. Games are still not great at conveying romantic relationships and this is doing a pretty fair job
Almost certain that I'm physically stuck near the end of the 2nd part of the game and I really don't want to restart the whole section, which seems to be my only solution.
I'm at the part where you get the cog in that sandy area. As you walk out with it a big wall appears around the central, miniaturized area. You can go back where you came from and look through a tiny hole near the back wall to see the other side of that walled off area. I figured I could throw the red orb over the wall, control it through this window to deactivate the gate. Well, I threw it too far to the right and can't see it. I also can't jump over the wall. The game won't let you jump on top of the blocks. So I'm stuck. I think - unless I'm missing something - that my only option is to restart, which means doing all the red/blue/aquamarine block puzzles again. I don't want to do that.
If you're at where I think you are, I don't believe you're stuck no. This part is actually kind of frustrating as it actually asks you to do some platforming out of nowhere.
To get over the wall go to the area where you first get the cog, and turn towards the desert building. As you start walking along the walkway towards it, you'll see a break in the side of the walkway to your right. Run and jump through that break onto a rock, then that rock lets you step over the wall and into the larger zone outside, which is where you take the red ball
