Broken Pieces

Broken Pieces evokes numerous other games during its opening hours–an often endearing quality when eventually those inspirations manifest into something wholly original.

Resident Evil, Silent Hill, Alan Wake, Control, Gone Home, Alone in the Dark. Stephen King and H.P. Lovecraft began to rapidly trickle in as did a number of avant-garde thrillers.

If anything, Broken Pieces cements itself in the earliest days of point-and-click adventures and fixed camera angle horror like Capcom and Konami’s classics.

For hours, I found myself mystified by the game’s endearing charm. Developed by the small French studio Elseware Experience, Broken Pieces begins and ends humbly. Players will be able to identify seams in the budget, forming that “indie” nomenclature readily in the brain. But I found Broken Pieces‘ pared down visuals evoking a PlayStation 2 aesthetic in my mind. The deliberate combat was an ode to confined environments and tank controls. Saint Exile’s ghost-like atmosphere and lack of life merely added to the budding narrative questions.

And then the hours went on.

Broken Pieces starts in an alien environment of jagged, rock-like formations carved into a tunnel. Electronic equipment lines the makeshift hallway while ghosts made of static hover feet above the ground. Our protagonist, Elise, walks towards the light at the end of the tunnel.

This head-scratching moment is only revisited once over the course of Broken Pieces and one that is never fully explained. Yet it was a strange enough opening that I was immediately intrigued. It would take about an hour before the game’s title finally emerged on screen. During that time I took Elise through her house as her thoughts were spoken out loud. I watched the blonde-haired woman position a gun against her wrist, fire the trigger, and lift into the air as a storm erupted. From there I made my way to a lighthouse and solved a puzzle by identifying a worker’s birthday on a nearby boat.

Explaining Broken Pieces‘ narrative like this is a deliberate choice. When taken bit by bit, the game is undeniably strange but it surprisingly works. Set in the early 1990s, Elise has limited access to technology. Her constant companion is a cassette player where players can conveniently pause, rewind, and fast-forward tapes that deliver exposition and clues to puzzles. It also provides the only avenue for hearing the voice of a character that isn’t Elise. The game’s music is diegetic, only heard when selecting a tape containing tunes created by Elise’s boyfriend Pierre.

Pierre is nowhere to be found, as are all the other residents of Saint Exile. Upon waking, players are informed the narrative is taking place 17 days after some kind of attack. Elise’s ability to trigger an instantaneous weather change is due to a glowing rock attached to her bracelet. Where did the glowing blue rock come from?

The sleepy, eerie town of Saint Exile is a fascinating destination that compelled me to investigate Broken Pieces with dedication and care. The absence of human life made even more puzzling when Elise identifies propaganda from a local cult outside her home, along with military vehicles. Did the government attack? Did the cult?

Those questions burn in the back of players’ mind as cassette tapes are played and Elise continues her internal monologues. Upon solving the initial electrical problem at her house by turning on generators at the lighthouse, the game’s narrative swells. Broken Pieces introduces three potential main threads Elise will follow over the course of the game. Finding out that a spy was the former resident of her home, Elise stumbles upon three investigation boards that outline evidence for a number of intertwining conspiracies.

In one fell swoop, Elseware Experience hooked me. An unknown, Lovecraftian entity slumbering beneath the ocean that has been tracked around the world for decades? Sold. A creepy cult that believes in said entity and has been doing weird things around town. Um, yes. A government operation with a badass codename that may have caught wind of shenanigans and wiped out the town? Hell yeah.

“Are you ready?” the game seemed to ask. “Yes,” I hypothetically replied and buckled in.

Broken Pieces‘ structure had already kind of sold me with its simplicity. Based on the tutorial, combat seemed like it was going to be fairly rote. Elise firmly plants her feet on the ground, aims at an enemy, waits for the crosshair to turn red for maximum accuracy, then fires a bullet. She can dodge from an attack or repel enemies with a burst of energy powered by the strange blue rock. Enemies took on the form of ghostly figures that would zip around and swing tentacle-like appendages. Most went down in three shots.

Around Saint Exile there were a number of doors and gates that were “locked from this side” or blocked by some kind of object or future puzzle. Many of these roadblocks appeared to provide shortcuts from one spot to the next. Thankfully, the camera in the game wasn’t too fixed, providing two viewpoints at the touch of a button while also allowing players to go into first-person to investigate further.

The buckle was tight around my waist. Sure the game was on the simpler side but its subdued nature was oozing charm.

And then the hours went on.

What began to grow more and more apparent with Broken Pieces was that players’ only real goal was to progress towards some nebulous point. To do that, doors needed to be unlocked. Lots and lots of doors.

The game only mildly guides players towards a central destination, leaving almost all the in-between up to guesswork. To progress to the shops near the beach I knew I needed to somehow distract a crow to get it to drop a key that would allow me to unlock a handyman’s truck that would give me an axe that would help me break down a barrier to a ladder that would allow me to grab the circuit breaker that was keeping a gate open. I could finally take that circuit breaker and leave it permanently on a different gate.

Puzzles in Broken Pieces are less puzzles and more like run-on sentences similar to the one above. I could distract the crow by throwing a mushroom on the ground but had to run around breaking scarecrows first before eventually running away from the crow so it wouldn’t be scared of me. “Puzzles” or obstacles that prohibit progress usually aren’t complicated or even convoluted. However, an obvious solution might be there but the means of execution are out of the player’s grasp or shoved behind several minutes of backtracking.

There came a point in time where I knew exactly where I needed to go in Broken Pieces but could not figure out how to get there. I felt that I had been everywhere the game had allowed me to go and collected everything required of me. But I could not figure out how to get to a manor that controlled Saint Exile’s water and would allow me to eventually cross a couple barriers to collect items I needed.

By this time I had memorized every inch of the game that I had encountered and thought I was doing something wrong.

About halfway through the game, Elise decides to plunge her bracelet into a fountain. The narrative hadn’t indicated this was a thing but implied it was given knowledge. The blue rock reacting with the water suddenly blanketed Saint Exile with snow. This seasonal change primarily froze water and lowered the sea level, opening up new paths but players could also hit certain cliffsides with an axe to cause them to crumble during the winter.

I had used this ability once because the game tutorialized the action in the same outside area. To access that manor I needed to get to and have my progress unstuck? You guessed it, do the same by a cliffside near the lighthouse the game never forced me to go back to.

A good deal of progress in Broken Pieces is left up to guesswork, some significantly less obvious. My primary frustrations with the game grew and came to a head in this period of absent-mindedly trying to further the story along. Across Saint Exile are doors that players think may need to be unlocked. However, some of these doors will seemingly never open. If an object can be interacted with, the game will give it a colored outline by default. Lots of dressers and trashcans and boxes hold items that can be crafted into finite higher quality ammo that kills enemies faster. Other points of interest are often highlighted once and disappear when interacted with. Blocked doors and paths, on the other hand, are always highlighted yellow.

I kept coming back to this large house that I thought was the manor, hoping beyond hope that the key I had would magically open it. After all, I had to solve a puzzle involving guess work and sound clues to press a keypad in the right order. By the end of the game, I never got that door opened and just wished the game would stop acting like I could. In Elise’s bedroom, players can interact with her closet door but are always informed it’s locked. What’s the point in that? Why is it locked in the first place and if it can never be opened… why suggest it could be?

These baffling decisions compound when players know where to go but just can’t figure out how to get there. I wish the camera angles were to blame for any confusion but those only become an issue in the smallest of environments. Broken Pieces also commits the sin of limiting players’ inventory when there is no justification to do it. Elise can’t hold two “large” items like an axe or a lever at the same time. Collectible items that don’t seem to serve the gameplay or progression take up valuable space.

Backtracking and exploring are important components to Broken Pieces and this genre. Initially I found the implementation of a time crunch to be interesting. If out past a certain time, the streets get dangerous and enemy encounters are more frequent. But Elise loses time when traveling between main sections of Saint Exile and can also lose two hours resting at a bench to recover health and supernatural energy. It took me about 12 in-game days to finish Broken Pieces while an achievement is rewarded for those who do it in 5.

Elise does need to rest to consult her notes and unlock tapes that provide important solutions to narratives and puzzles. But in retrospect, I’m not sure that I truly needed to listen to any of the tapes outside of my own desire to further unravel the story. The time limitations were surface deep and the narrative never suggested anything bad would happen if Elise took a certain amount of time to reach her goal.

Broken Pieces began to reach a point where it expected the player to extract fun from the least engaging of moments. Combat never truly evolved and the two times a new element was introduced, it brought frustration rather than excitement or tension. I never breathed a sigh of relief after scouring my brain for an answer to a wacky moment. Given enough time, players could brute force most puzzles that don’t require a specific object.

All my good memories of the game began to dissipate as I felt it nearing a conclusion that did not feel earned. Across the 12-or-so hour journey I had played five minutes of a quirky retro-inspired 8-bit game. I had bested 7 ball puzzles that only netted me a faster reload on my gun. I had seen almost everything there was to see.

And then I realized: I forgot what the hell Elise was doing in the first place. Through her cute jokes and comforting dialog, I had warmed up to Elise as a protagonist that had merely became swept up in something that was beyond her comprehension. Knowing a bit of French and having visited the country before, I liked being able to recognize accents and signage. Saint Exile was cozy despite all the creepy shit going on.

I knew why I was invested in the game. I wanted the giant shafts of water in the ocean explained to me. I wanted to solve the mystery of what was going on. But as Elise found her way into the crypt of the church in one of the game’s penultimate moments, I felt guilt for not really comprehending how or why she had gotten there outside of forward momentum. I know she wanted to find Pierre and some clue as to where everything went wrong and why. But all those things had already happened outside of the in-game events. Elise randomly visited corrupted memories but was the narrative happening out of time?

There were so many questions that were on the tip of my tongue but I couldn’t identify why I had them in the first place. In a way, it felt as if I had been forcing Elise to walk around in circles when she could have simply gone down the road for the answers. And, in a way, that’s how the narrative progressed. Sure players could suss out why some of the building had elaborate locking mechanisms or confounding happenings but it never felt entirely cohesive.

After almost stumbling upon the final cutscene the screen jolted to black and I was left confused. Did I miss something? Was this the bad ending? What happened to all that other stuff?

My memory of the game became fractured, almost broken. Did I enjoy this? Where was it all leading to? There were so many questions I had that I sat back befuddled and simply thought about the game as a whole for a long time. I told my girlfriend about it before bed. The next day I talked to my coworker about it. Broken Pieces has so much promise but it all led to one big ellipses punctuated by a faint question mark. Beyond traditional symbolism that games hope to invoke, the order of operations here felt so scattered. Is this a big team that got a little in over their heads? Or was the point to never answer the numerous questions posed in the first hours? In a way, this quandary ensures the game won’t leave my thoughts any time soon.

Broken Pieces ultimately leaves an impression on the player. The setting and tone are undeniably intriguing and will spark the curiosity of willing players. Presenting a massively fascinating web of narratives, developer Elseware Games aimed high but definitely got a little lost in the weeds on delivering a satisfying conclusion. But the exploration and puzzle-heavy gameplay may begin to wear on players seeking more action than backtracking. Broken Pieces has its moments but never manages to capitalize on its initial promise.