Everyone has a story about falling in love with San Francisco. The City by the Bay captures the imagination with its history, quirks and architecture. For game developer Hanford Lemoore, the city holds a special place both personally and professionally.

Growing up in the South Bay, Lemoore said San Francisco was the spot for special occasions. Whenever there was a moment to celebrate, Lemoore’s family found themselves in the city. As an adult, the allure of the city was strong. He moved to the Mission District in 2010 right at 16th Street and Valencia. “It was a whole new experience for me,” he said. “I explored all around the area. I fell in love with Victorian architecture.”

It also ended up being the setting for “Maquette,” a puzzle game that he’s been working on for a decade. The idea focuses on a world within a world. Like a gamified Russian nesting doll, players are dropped into an area that looks like the Palace of the Fine Arts. They’ll notice that there’s a smaller replica of that same domed structure at the center of it.

The gameplay premise in “Maquette” involves a world within a world. Players encounter a diorama that reflects the bigger world at large. (Annapurna Interactive) 

The Core Idea

The quirk at the heart of the gameplay is that players can grab certain objects and place them in the diorama and that is reflected in the bigger world outside. For example, players can find a key that unlocks a door. That leads to a puzzle where players have to get to a building across a gap but no bridge exists. The chasm is too large to jump across so players have to discover an alternative path.

They can head to the small replica, and use that same key, and because the replica is smaller, the key can turn into a bridge. Leaving it there, they can turn around and find an enormous key in the regular-sized world that lets them cross. “Maquette” plays with this sense of scale through its seven chapters.

It starts players off easy, teaching concepts about how players can manipulate an object’s size to get where they want. Lemoore and his team at Graceful Decay add in key and lock mechanics. The concept even shrinks players who travel to the world’s outer edges. The puzzles grow more abstract toward the end of the campaign, but they remain inventive exploring the outer limits of the recursive concepts.

The only issue is that toward the end, during The Spiral chapter, the puzzles get difficult. Players run into a few red herrings and situations take more exploration to solve.

The later levels of “Maquette” become more abstract and twisted as the narrator, Michael, deals with a breakup. (Annapurna Interactive) 

Finding the right story

The hook is intriguing but the problem that Lemoore ran into is putting the puzzles into context. Originally, he imagined a fantasy story to justify the world-within-a-world mechanic, but that didn’t seem right.

“At the end of 2019, we played with the idea of a love story,” he said, but he didn’t want to make it a fantasy. Instead, he grounded the narrative in the real world and San Francisco.

“Maquette” takes place in the mind of Michael, voiced by Seth Gabel, who uncovers an old sketchbook, and that personal relic releases a flood of memories about a past relationship with an old flame named Kenzie, voiced by Bryce Dallas Howard.

The two met at a San Francisco coffee shop and “Maquette” follows the flow of that relationship from friendship to romance to its looming end. Confessional bits of narrative pop up as Michael flips the pages and dives deep into the arabesque of memories. At times, they’re illustrated by the storyteller’s drawings and the puzzles themselves become a metaphor for the internal drama he feels.

During the breakup in “Maquette,” San Francisco twists and becomes distorted from the narrator’s perspective. (Annapurna Interactive) 

When gameplay and story sing

That’s where “Maquette” excels. Players see the narrative and the puzzle design interlock to express complex emotions — the idea of building bridges to another person, the emotion of feeling turmoil reflected in the changing San Francisco landscape.

“We use that to tell the love story,” said Lemoore. He liked the concept of seeing tiny problems seeming like big obstacles and that’s reflected in the puzzles and the narrative.

Looking at the project as a whole, the process in creating “Maquette” reflects the relationship he had with the game and his bond with San Francisco. “When the project is going well, it’s great, but then it could take a bad turn, and it wrecks my heart,” he said.

And in the end, Lemoore did move out of San Francisco. The idea “wasn’t lost on me,” he said about how the game and his life went. “I was also packing up my bags. It was time for me to move on.”

Lemoore ended up leaving San Francisco before “Maquette” was published. He now lives in Nevada.

‘Maquette’

3 stars out of four
Platform: PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, PC
Rating: Teen