Bryce Dallas Howard, director of chapter 4 and 11 of The Mandalorian, has given her voice, along with husband Seth Gabel, to Annapurna Interactive’s first-person puzzle video game Maquette.
Developed by Graceful Decay, the game is set in a recursive world where players experience the life cycle of a relationship and solve spacial puzzles as the story unfolds. Howard and Gabel play romantic couple Kenzie and Michael, characters who guide players through the narrative but are not explicitly seen on screen.
“This is about a relationship that ultimately doesn’t work out,” Howard tells The Hollywood Reporter, “but it’s not a tragedy in any way, shape or form.” There is no villain in the game, she says, instead it follows two people who were together for a time in their life and impacted one another’s growth, and then simply moved on. “I think there’s something really nuanced about that that I really appreciated,” explains Howard.
The role of Kenzie was described to the actor by director Hanford Lemoore as a “San Francisco hipster.” But performing the role required some balance, Howard says, because Kenzie was “interested enough” in that scene, so that the story could move forward, but wasn’t so earnest that suddenly she’s no longer a hipster. “It’s an interesting archetype, the hipster, and there’s this inherent sense of irony,” she adds.
As things progressed, the idea was to have the characters’ dialogue feel conversational and modern, as if they were two people in a real world, but with a bit of a heightened element as well.
This is the debut game for Lemoore at Graceful Decay, and he first conceived of the idea while exploring the architecture in his neighborhood in San Francisco ten years ago. “Something set me off about trying to do [a game] in 3D with physics,” Lemoore tells THR, a concept which was “way beyond” his initial thought to do a 2D game featuring a world within a world. “I thought about how physics is so chaotic; with a physics simulation you can knock an object and you know it’s going to tumble, but you don’t know how it’s going to tumble,” says Lemoore, using the example of bowling pins going all over the place. “I thought about the idea of copying that really complex, almost random behavior, onto multiple levels of recursion.”
Maquette is available now on PC via Steam, PS5, and PS4. The PS5 version is included with PlayStation Plus throughout March, and a launch discount is available on Steam.
