Fragments of Him Reviews

Thoughtful and melancholy. I enjoyed the story and presentation.

This is a mature, thoughtful rumination on the life of a person and how, in that life, other lives intersected. This is a slow and poignant story. taking its time. Might be a bit slow for some, sure, and the mechanics are just a means to cycle through the story, but it's a heartfelt one and that can only be good. I'm brought to mind of an episode of the television show "Cucumber" of a good few years ago. In it, just before the untimely passing of someone, an entire episode is spent on their life leading up to this unfortunate incident. This plays much like that; a life in stolen moments, in fragments, by those around them. If I am to be critical, I'd say the character models, well, the faces, don't really work. Of course these are the hardest to get right, but at times I really could have done with some eyes. It is a good attempt at "styling it out" though, so I do appreciate that. All in all, an enjoyable way to spend a couple of hours, even with the heartbreak.

I found this game kind of stilted and slow, with a lot of looking for things in silence. The environments were great, the narration definitely was fantastic, and as a queer person I thought the story was pretty good. (Hey other reviewers, it's not a "bury your gays" story if only one dies, come on.) I love walking sims and I love interactive fiction, but here it felt off-putting when the narration felt like a storybook, but each page turn took 10-60+ seconds of hunting for things to click on. I would've preferred to freely navigate while the narration was more automatic. I also thought the character models - while effective at conveying grief - lacked personality and made it hard for me to emotionally buy into what I was seeing. I was far more invested in what I was hearing than anything else.