14 DAY TRIAL // 
Elise has used the only circuit breaker to open the gate to a park and now she needs to retrieve it to open another door to get to the beach. That means she needs to discover another way to get into the park, which in turn means getting rid of some debris that blocks access to a ladder. There’s one visitor panel in the park that offers a hint to the solution and then it’s just a matter of going to three locations in order to perform a certain action before getting one special item that can trigger an interaction. This is not a difficult puzzle, but it does ask the player to read one specific piece of information that is relatively easy to miss.
Broken Pieces is developed by Elseware Experience, Benoit Dereau, and Mael Vignaux, with publishing in the hands of Freedom Games. I played it using Steam on the PC and players will also be able to get it on the PlayStation 5, the Xbox Series X and S, and older devices from Microsoft and Sony, in time for Halloween. This is a psychological action-adventure experience that also features puzzles and some combat.
Our protagonist is a woman named Elise, alone in a French village, with a weird rock tied to her wrist and a missing boyfriend. There’s no other human in Saint-Exile to interact with but there are cassette tapes to find, delivering a lot of exposition and details about what might have happened here. Players will also get a running commentary from Elise herself. The game delivers three significant narrative threads to work through, with writing that varies in quality quite a bit.
Broken Pieces is a third-person action-adventure, with an emphasis on the exploration side of the genre. Elise can move at will through the village, collecting items, finding doors that she can open, and solving puzzles to access new areas. Each scene can be explored from two different perspectives, which reveals more info about an area and can offer clues for the puzzles. The character has a limited inventory to work with, making it important to choose what to carry with you, and a gun for self-defense. The unexplained phenomenon that raptured the village's population also gave Elise the power to alter the weather for a short period of time.
From time to time, weird spectral enemies appear, and Elise will have to use her trusty firearm and superior dodging abilities to take them out. These sequences don’t add much to Broken Pieces and feel added just to give players something else to do rather than solve puzzles.
The frequency of enemy encounters increases after 8 PM, which makes it a good idea to get back home and into bed to sleep. That also allows our protagonist to regain health if the spectral enemies took a chunk out. The beach is the other location that offers health and stamina regeneration for those willing to spend 2 hours out of their day there.
I appreciate that the puzzles in Broken Pieces are mostly well-integrated with the environment, with solutions that do not feel outlandish. There’s a lot of backtracking through the empty village that adds nothing to the game. The inventory also feels too small given the nature of the game. It’s nice that the village also offers a few sidequests and mysteries to uncover.
The game’s mechanics are not interesting enough to sustain it but the story, with its supernatural and conspiracy elements, is interesting enough to keep players moving forward (the developers have provided a walkthrough on the official wiki page for anyone who gets stuck).
Broken Pieces is a decent-looking game, with the developers making good use of the limited area of the village to deliver a lot of detail. Elise’s movements are natural, outside of combat, and the ‘90s vibe permeates the entire experience, adding a layer of immersive nostalgia.
The sound design will probably be more divisive. The cassette tape mechanic could work well but it is overused. The only music in the game comes from tracks that the boyfriend has recorded for Elise. And the sound of seagulls is omnipresent and a little oppressive.
The Good
- Solid narrative
- Most puzzles make sense
- Weather changing powers
The Bad
- Overuses cassette tapes
- Limited gameplay
- Combat design
Conclusion
The experience would have benefited from less reliance on cassette tapes. I also wanted to get more of a sense of how Elise is emotionally affected by everything that’s happening. Broken Pieces shows that a small team can deliver an engaging, tight experience but the game needs better integration between its narrative and gameplay.
Review code provided by the publisher.
