While playing through Maquette, players will be introduced to a marvelous and beautiful world that expands infinitely in one direction and shrinks indefinitely in the other. Players are meant to use this feature to their advantage, manipulating the size and position of objects in order to solve various puzzles. Unfortunately, while some of these puzzles allow for creative solutions, there are many that must be done in a specific way. One such example of this is the puzzle in the second chapter, The Gateways, involving colored crystals that can open up barriers of the matching color.

Many players are experiencing issues where they can't seem to drop these crystals. When inputting the buttons that normally let players drop items, there is instead a buzzer sound indicating that it can't be dropped. This is the same noise made when an item is too big to fit into a given space, but that definitely isn't the case here. By all accounts, this seems like a fairly game breaking glitch in Maquette that requires players to start the level over.

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In actuality, this isn't a glitch at all, but rather an intended design. Essentially, players aren't able to drop a crystal if they are currently standing near a barrier that it opens. This means that players with the red crystal can't drop it if they're near a red barrier, and the same holds true for any other type of crystal. There are a lot of reasons why Graceful Decay may have decided to implement this feature, but it really should have informed players that this was the case in order to avoid so much confusion.

In order to solve these puzzles, players need to know a few things ahead of time. First, crystals will not deactivate a barrier unless they are currently being held by the player. This means that there's no reason to drop a crystal next to a barrier, and it's impossible to leave a crystal behind while keeping a barrier open. Next, the inability to drop crystals near barriers or throw them over walls makes the puzzle a bit more difficult, and players will need to engage with the recursive worlds around them in order to maneuver these items.

Again, it makes sense why Graceful Decay wouldn't want players leaving barriers open with crystals, as this would negate a lot of the puzzles in this level, but that really isn't a great reason to disable this. Puzzle games should reward players for thinking outside the box, and although Maquette does do that in certain instances, there are times such as this that it instead prefers to shoehorn its own solution in.

Maquette is available now on PC, PS4, and PS5.

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