Pieced Together Review – Scrapbooking memories

I first came across Glowfrog Games’ Pieced Together during Steam Next Fest and covered it briefly in my “Games that made me feel” post HERE. It’s a beautiful, cozy puzzler with a heartfelt story, and it took me on a nostalgic trip that I wasn’t expecting. How that I’ve had time to play the full game, I will confirm that the roller coaster continued, and I was completely unprepared for all the feelings and memories it brought back while playing it.

The story unfolds as you (Connie) are writing a letter to Beth after you find an old scrapbook.

Each chapter has you reliving memories of your time with your ‘best friend forever,’ Beth. It starts with you moving to a new place, starting school, and eventually going off to college. You will paste items and use stickers to decorate your scrapbook, with some of the items opening up more of the story. There are a lot of interactive pieces, and I enjoyed trying to decide which pieces belonged in the particular chapter I was working on. Click and drag mechanics were seamless in creating your scrapbook. You can rotate and move items around the page, and hold a button to glue them in place. If they are wrong, you can unglue them and move them. You can make mistakes, but it won’t let you move on until you have everything correct.

In the beginning, it’s primarily just place and paste, but later in the chapters, you will use additional items to solve puzzles, like a pen to circle answers on a quiz or a brush to remove dirt from pieces of a photograph.

I never found the scrapbook component to get boring, as there were new mechanics introduced, changing how you worked on the book. The sticker book is optional, but it allows a personal touch to the narrative direction. I loved that there was also an ‘inspect’ button where you could look closer at certain details (if you chose to), and those helped fill in details of Connie and Beth’s friendship story.

Some of the puzzles required a little thinking, but nothing to make your brain work overtime. Trying to decipher a school timetable using clues or completing a map through the Paris catacombs using written directions, for example. Even piecing together a recipe using slivers of paper and pictures.

Connie and Beth grow and change from 10-year-olds to 30-somethings over the course of the game, and I could easily put myself in their place, thinking about my friends over the years. My only complaint is that I wish I had more. Playtime was under 2 hours, and once we found out why the friends drifted apart, it seemed to wrap up quickly. I don’t know if an additional chapter would have helped here, but I think I simply didn’t want the game to end.

While the scrapbook was fun, and the star was the story writing, the voice acting was also stellar. Heartfelt and sincere, I felt every emotion in Connie’s voice. Made by a team of just four, headed by Bafta-winning artist and designer Kate Killick, this game was a delight and a fantastic reminder of sisterhood in the ‘90s. I appreciated it, I lived it, and I immediately reached out to some old friends I hadn’t spoken to in quite some time.

While the gameplay didn’t last long, the story has been on my mind since I finished it and will likely stay with me for a long time.