Maquette, the first title from studio Grateful Decay, attempts to breathe an emotional pulse into the humble first-person puzzle game, a genre classics like Myst, Riven, and The Witness are deceptive tests of perception and deduction. Maquette takes the opposite approach. The setting is as surreal, hallucinatory, and highly mystical as ever, but all its strangeness is hidden within a perfectly ordinary story about two artists who fall in and out of love in San Francisco. There are no shocking twists, no painful ambiguities, no hair-raising stakes. Rather, this is a very ordinary, familiar story, the kind that happens every day. That is both Maquette's strength and weakness.

Before we delve into all of that, let's talk about the puzzle of maquettes. You find yourself atop a mysterious pagoda surrounded by a rugged castle, a cursed forest, and blooming gardens. In the center of the pagoda is a diorama that reflects the surrounding terrain on a smaller scale. Everything is reflected and refracted. If I have a key and drop it in the corner, a much smaller key appears in the diorama. If I pick up that smaller key and place it in another part of the diorama, a normal-sized key appears at the same coordinates in the real world. So, in an early puzzle, I picked up a normal-sized key and placed it between two pillars in the diorama. Sure enough, when I got to that spot, a huge golden key fell from the sky and became a makeshift bridge.

Every puzzle in "Maquette" iterates the concept of using the power of perspective to shrink or expand the scope of the map; nearly all of the seven chapters in "Maquette" are built around this diorama, and within an hour of playing, the design team will ask you to explore the edges of what this distorted reality means. Perhaps you yourself are standing inside the diorama, and there is a larger diorama that encompasses what you conclude is a normal size. Consider, for a moment, the grandiose sweep of "Maquette" has a grandiosity not found in other games of its ilk. In "Witness," the sublime moment may come when you notice an orange prominently placed in a nondescript tree. In "Maquette," you travel through time and space to climb the stairs.

The diorama, in my opinion, is a fairly transparent metaphor for what goes on in the human mind when it is intoxicated with love. The honeymoon period in the first few chapters of the game is arcadian and lush, with only the sound of happily chirping birds. As their relationship begins to crack, the setting becomes muddy, eerie, and desolate. Finally, disaster strikes and the rebuilding process begins anew.

Mackett's story unfolds through a series of poignant stanzas written out in specific niches of the map and fully-voiced cutscenes in which we learn firsthand about the saga of Kenji and Michael. They met in a Bay Area coffee shop, went to a fair, fell in love, and moved in together ....... This is a very realistic depiction of contemporary romance. There are no closet secrets or awkward, pulpy operas. Two people get together in a very normal way and break up in a very normal way. In fact, the best scene in the game occurs when, after all the hoopla, the two meet for a final goodbye. It is written in a very, very truthful way.

Michael and Kenji never meet face to face, and the cutscenes are only accompanied by a few pictures, but they never strayed. At every point in their journey together, "Maquette" tells us exactly who they are and where they stand. A few silly passages had me rolling my eyes, but from start to finish, I wanted to see where these two would end up.

That said, this is an intentionally sparse story. In fact, throughout the game, it is difficult to tell whether you are playing as Kenji or Michael (the two even have the same pet name for each other, "Sunflower"). This emphasizes the universality of the scenario, but I couldn't help but wish there was a little more meat on the bones. Michael and Kenji don't have much character. Their only distinguishing feature is simply that they love each other very much, which is more than enough to carry the romance, but I would have liked a better description of why they hit it off in the first place. Of course, there is not a huge area of the puzzle to explain, but the dialogue of their brief encounter does not carry enough weight.

I felt the same way about some of the puzzles later in the game. The playground that Grateful Decay has created here-this giant, mind-expanding, mind-expanding kaleidoscope-never reaches its full psychotropic potential. Don't get me wrong, there is some inspired problem solving in "Maquette," but I also found myself pacing back and forth across a barren plain of nothingness to fine-tune the exact location of the miniature staircase. The galactic proportions that Grateful Decay is tackling are not compatible with the tedium of a rote adventure game. One or two more psychedelic pinnacles, like flipping a switch controller to solve one of Breath of the Wild's gauntlet of balls and mazes, would have been enough for this game.

This is underscored by some odd maneuvers. Simple inputs, such as sliding a wooden block to fit it into place on the grid, are hampered by the floating first-person controls. I was seriously annoyed with Marquette once while playing, but it felt like a problem that could have been fixed, not a fundamental problem with the game.

The beauty of "Maquette," though, is that it quietly fades from your life in about three hours. I played the game overnight, sinking deep into its thematic roots. Even in a crisis situation where the brain has severed the failsafe and is cascading through a bottomless disaster, humans have a way of finding fertile soil again. It is not a new story, but it is always a good reminder.