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Maquette gets Bryce Dallas Howard and March release date

Graceful Decay's Maquette now has a March release date, as well as a newly-revealed star-studded cast.

Ozzie Mejia

February 8, 2021 10:40 AM

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It's been almost a year since Annapurna Interactive first announced that they would publish Graceful Decay's visually stunning puzzle game, Maquette. There were few details about the game at the time, but one of the main ones was that it would follow the full cycle of a relationship that started in a coffee shop. On Monday, the publisher revealed the voices behind the people in that relationship, as well as a new release date.

Monday's trailer revealed that Jurassic World's Bryce Dallas Howard and Fringe's Seth Gabel would lend their voices to Maquette's two main characters. They'll play a couple who first met in a coffee shop and reflect on their memories, which manifest in the form of various first-person puzzles. Players will be challenged to solve these puzzles and will be rewarded with dazzling visuals that evoke love, loss, and acceptance.

Graceful Decay's Hanford Lemoore first designed Maquette as a way to express the cycle of a relationship through the visuals of California's Bay Area. Maquette is based many of the sights and scenes from the architecture and environment of Lemoore's hometown of San Francisco. Lamoore showed the first Maquette prototype at the 2011 Game Developers Conference. After years in development, Annapurna Interactive came along last year and picked up the publishing rights.

"While the fantastical puzzles and recursive reality of Maquette deliver the 'a-ha' moments, Bryce and Seth convey the emotional heartbeat of the story," Lemoore said via press release. "The message behind Maquette is truly one of understanding - understanding in the physical world, in the mind, and in the heart. Bryce and Seth’s incredible performances will bring that message to life."

This is a busy year for Annapurna Interactive. The team has more than one indie game in the pipe for 2021, including Luis Antonio's Twelve Minutes, Variable Slate's Last Stop, Beethover & Dinosaur's The Artful Escape, and Fullbright's Open Roads. It looks like Maquette will be released before all of these games, as the publisher confirmed a March release along with today's trailer.

Maquette will come to PC, PlayStation 5, and PlayStation 4 on March 2 and will sell for $19.99 USD.

Ozzie Mejia

Senior Editor

Ozzie has been playing video games since picking up his first NES controller at age 5. He has been into games ever since, only briefly stepping away during his college years. But he was pulled back in after spending years in QA circles for both THQ and Activision, mostly spending time helping to push forward the Guitar Hero series at its peak. Ozzie has become a big fan of platformers, puzzle games, shooters, and RPGs, just to name a few genres, but he’s also a huge sucker for anything with a good, compelling narrative behind it. Because what are video games if you can't enjoy a good story with a fresh Cherry Coke?