Maquette Review (Aven)
tl;dr: Maquette is a simple puzzler that presents itself as a metaphor/backdrop to a story told via voiced interludes and text throughout the environment. The story is bland, the puzzles are frustrating and unclear, the mechanics are underutilized, and the controls are incredibly clunky.
Mechanics
The main gimmick for the game is recursion - each level contains a miniature version of itself that you can kinda interact with. A puzzle might require that you place an object inside the small version of the level, which then appears at that spot in the main level and can serve as a makeshift bridge to traverse a gap. Unfortunately, that is about the extend to which this mechanic is explored. The recursion mechanic is the main reason I was drawn to the game, so this was a huge disappointment. The one exception is the level which allows you to move the level around inside itself - this is really cool and I got excited for a couple minutes, and then the game ended. That last level felt like it should have been near the beginning, so the fact that it was supposed to be the high point is rather telling.
The controls are nearly unbearable. Movement is slow and even slower when you walk into the larger version of the level, and the fact that the shift button slows you down more instead of sprinting feels like some kind of cruel prank. Picking up/moving items is imprecise and unwieldy and there is no clear indication of what can and can't be jumped over. All of this means that you often can't tell if you've done anything correctly or just glitched your way to the solution, all the while wrestling with the controls to do very basic tasks. The icing on the cake is when the game yanks away control out of nowhere with a slow-pan cutscene every few minutes.
Puzzles
The game just feels like they didn't really know how to make a puzzler. Rules for solving puzzles are introduced and then immediately thrown out - things that worked before don't work in subsequent levels, and there isn't any kind of progression or escalation of the mechanics. Nothing is ever explained, which is fine, but when combined with this lack of consistency it's just a chore to figure out what exactly they wanted you to do. And again, it's usually not the main attraction of the recursive levels, but rather just a thing you gotta find to put somewhere to open something.
Story
The story is the most generic, bland narrative about a couple you could possibly imagine: A couple falls in love, has problems, and breaks up. Woopdido.. It is told via text found throughout the level as well as some voiced sections. The voice acting is great, but that's about it.
Achievements
Not all achievements are guaranteed - you have to go back and redo levels in a certain time limit. I didn't bother.