Broken Pieces Reviews

[h3]Female Protagonist[/h3] Is what sold it for me, although as I played further in, the story kept building out in an intriguing way, a sad story that reminded me of Everyone has gone to the Rapture. Broken Pieces takes things to another level, weaving threads of culture, history and religion versus cultists. I liked the way pieces of the story drop into place and make sense as you go along. Set in a small French seaside town, makes for great visuals. [h3]Puzzles and Cassette Tapes[/h3] The game has a fair number of puzzles, many of them left by George, a local artist/gadget maker. A variety of reasonably logical puzzles block you at various points, but if you love puzzles, George has provided many optional ones too. Which gives you extra goals, and if the game is played on harder difficulties, these side puzzles will help you with resources. It will help to draw a pencil map of the game after a while just to speed up moving from area to area, because the game has you opening quite a jumble of routes. Clues abound, keep your eyes peeled and keep playing those cassettes people leave for you and ones that your avatar records, into the player. Having the protagonist voice their thoughts as messages on tape she is leaving for perhaps her boyfriend makes the game immersive and more real. You can actually hear what your PC is wanting to be doing. It's a brilliant game mechanic, which almost makes the obligatory "journal" of notes and goals optional. [h3]Mechanical and Linguistic Weakness[/h3] A few puzzles are mechanically a bit contrived to solve if you are an engineer. You also have to develop a grasp of French at some point, because the game is set in France, so all the signage and some items have French names. Very late in the game I also noticed that the names of some families in the story must have been changed slightly because they did not match, but not enough to slow me down. The voice-over word choices are slightly unnatural, almost as if it was directly translated then dropped to the narrator. Who mind you is pretty good and never got tiring to listen to. The game throws in half a dozen indie music tracks as well to give you something to listen to in the background if like me you are terrible at games that require a bit of memory. It took me about 8 hours. [h3]Overall[/h3] The game took a while to get interesting, and then picked up pace a lot. I liked how the action switched gear well especially since the player is really following a very prescribed set of steps. Nice graphics, very few glitches and just 1 hang/crash. Has some rough edges at times when clicking on things, but the camera otherwise generally behaved well. Atmospheric, the game is very atmospheric, the soundtrack matches very well. Lighting and environmental effects and weather all worked just fine. Poignant ending. If you liked this review, or liked this game, you can find more like it in this curated list https://store.steampowered.com/curator/41773079-EmpathyGames/list/90678

Good enough game. Visually very nice. Cannot understand the "have to go to sleep 8pm because night dangerous..." mechanic. Made the backtracking stupid. I get it, it had to be there to extend the game time, but still. And the ending. Didn't get it. Especially when it was winding up to be something interesting and maybe awesome. So two problems with the game. Got it on sale for 4 eur so no regrets. Still hope to see something even more interesting and polished from this studio.

Teaboy's Basic(ish) Reviews....I read a lot of reviews when looking at games on Steam, and it quickly gets tiring – those who write involved, down to the micron scale reviews, although helpful, end up like looking at War & Peace when you’ve only got time for a quick 5 minute dump! This is middle of the road and to the point – not easy for me as I tend towards sesquipedalian loquaciousness! Vociferously Verbose? Alright, verbal diarrhoea. (Although I hate panning a developer’s work and all the time, effort and love they put into designing these – it is their life after all – this is my honest, personal opinion of my level of enjoyment. Sorry devs!). A note on time played: My Steam clock does not seem to work properly, indeed, it even minuses time on occasion! Plus, I have a tendency to wander off and leave games running at times, so time played may not be entirely accurate! Teaboy’s Tonsil Titillators or Toenail Titbits! (Rating) Tonsil Tickler (Totally Tops): The frenchy of which you always dreamt! To quote a master, “She’s got a tongue like an electric eel and she likes the taste of a Man’s tonsils!”. An absolute masterpiece and joy to play. The Tits (Terrific): Everyone loves playing with these! Not THE best bit, but such fun on their own you can be lost for hours....mmmm. What most games you really like score – perfection is so rare after all. Torso Teaser (Taker of your Time): It’s a flat stomach....sure it’s nice to look at, run your fingers over, slobber on a bit, sometimes that bellybutton gets your motor running....but it's just basically the corridor between the two ‘gaming rooms’. The definitive ‘Meh’ - the middle ‘sideways thumb’ option for which everyone on Steam cries. Todger/Tadger & (scroTum) Taters (Tedious): Is it an ‘a’ or is it an ‘o’? Who cares! The meat can be fun to play with for about 5 minutes of your entire day, the rest it just hangs there and generally gets in the way of doing something else. The main problem of course, is the two veg sticking to your inside thigh. This is what this game feels like – the occasional/rare bouts of fun, the rest bobbing like a 19th century British Policeman (now you know why!). Toenail Tornado (Total Toss): A playthrough so appalling it’s like being trapped in a Turkish sauna with the ugliest, hairiest, fattest, sweatiest beast of a neolithic hominid who’s trimming his toenails using pliers and the splinters are reminiscent of a scene from the Normandy Landings. My god how did this get released!? Teaboy Touts (Score): Firm Torso! The Review: It's not a bad game, but everything is just so average. Graphics maxed out my 3060 Ti (but gpu is meant to work at max, so....) however. even switching down to min/low it barely made a difference, and max graphics were decent but nothing fantabulous - one of those games where the environment is great but the actual characters are meh. I got a lot of weird blackouts when going into the church, every time, but only for a couple of seconds. Otherwise everything was hunky dory. Movement is fine but not particularly smooth - an industry standard for this type of game (think Res Evil 4 back in the day), so fluid movement is awkward when in combat. Combat itself is awfully clunky and although occurring fairly often, is always identical and pretty much a side-story seemingly tacked on - and trying to dodge/repel is an absolute pain in the posterior; I never got the hang of it. The game shines, or at least its core is, in puzzles. It's a classic toing and froing game, in other words, backtracking bonanza! There are a limited number of locales you have to go back and forth between all game, unlocking as you go, so is standard fair once more. You have a snazzy little gem on a bracelet that lets you call storms to aid outside of combat, but it is very underutilized, whilst in-combat it repels, but as stated is awkward - the whole combat system is. I never got all cassettes/memories/portals, although I went EVERYWHERE without missing anything....or did I? I did find one glitch whereby I simply could not see a licence plate on a beached rowboat - I had to look up a guide whereupon I have no idea how he got that camera angle. Smh. I was only missing maybe 1 of each, so a big pfffft to that! Oh, I also looked up the gate code cos I just couldn't hear it properly! I reloaded after finishing to finish that boat puzzle and the prize puzzle which actually got me 2 more gun upgrades - there are only 3 so I did the entire game with jut the first! This is pretty poor staging/progression by the devs from my perspective, playing so much of the game (in my case ALL of it) without the upgrades. I did have a break of about 6 weeks between playing, so had to spend a while relearning wtf I'd done already! My playtime seems to be 2 or 3 times the average, but I never rush games and never do speedruns, they're just not my thing. Overall a decent little 3rd person puzzle adventure with the seemingly usual not-so-good-combat. Plus I found having to listen to all those tapes, some over 4 minutes long, tedious, sometimes multiple times....very tedious.