![]() Let’s say you need to get into a house, but it’s absent a stoop or stairs or any way up, really. “It’s like the size of Skyrim or something.”Īnything you do on one plane will affect all of the other planes. “Mathematically, there’s even a world even larger than that,” Lemoore told me. ![]() And according to Lemoore, it just keeps going and going. But if you look beyond the walls of the space you’re in, you can make out an even bigger world, with even bigger versions of all the stuff you see in your normal-sized world. In the central area here sits that maquette, a miniaturised carbon copy of the normal world, complete with a dome itself. There’s the “normal” world, a four-sided town square with a dome overhead. (OK, technically, you can also jump, but it’s barely a bunny hop.) The game’s world consists of multiple, coexistent, proportionally rendered planes of different sizes. 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.” Gif: Graceful Decay / Kotaku “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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