Pieced Together Preview: Making Memories

Summary

• Pieced Together offers a cosy, emotional experience exploring childhood friendships through a scrapbook.
• The game features beautifully illustrated keepsakes that evoke memories and emotions for players.
• Developed by a team of experienced women, the game aims to connect with players on an emotional level.

Pieced Together is a beautiful story-driven game with a cosy vibe but heartbreaking undertones. It tells the story of Connie, a thirty-something woman who is making a scrapbook of old photographs and keepsakes, while reminiscing about Beth, her best friend at school.

At WASD, part of London Games Week, we got a chance to play the demo and chat with Kate Killick, CEO and creative lead of Glowfrog Games, about Pieced Together’s development, inspiration and reception.

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When you sit down in front of Pieced Together the first word that comes to mind is cosy. Everything from the art style to the menu is cute pastel shades and adorable icons. Even the studio logo is a frog you’ll want to immediately have as a badge, sticker, or anything you can show off really. The tone is perfect for this game, since you’ll be assembling a scrapbook, and the carefully illustrated keepsakes are perfect for displaying.

“We started off with the idea of scrapbooking,” explains Killick. “I actually made a scrapbook during lockdown in the pandemic, partly just because I needed to sort out all my old stuff, but also I found it a really good way to help with anxiety during lockdown, because it's just such a calming, kind of mindful activity to do. So that was where we started off with the game itself.”

In the demo, you start assembling the mementos of Connie’s life into a digital scrapbook. They include school photos, name tags, cards, and museum tickets, alongside a number of doodles and small crafted items. Each page of the scrapbook tells a story through the items it contains and you need to work out which ones belong together.

As you move on, there are also small puzzles based on ordering items, as well as identifying them. Nothing is difficult, but it adds a little extra hook to the game, rather than just having you make a scrapbook totally freehand. As you handle each item, you begin to think about if it fits and how it relates in an unexpectedly well-balanced mix of puzzles and customisation.

You see things through Connie’s eyes as you assemble the scrapbook guided by a series of relaxing puzzles. There are also customisation options, and some extra touches you can use to make the scrapbook your own.

The objects really do tell a story, similar to how they would in a game like Unpacking, and the main narrative is related to childhood friendships, and how they can drift apart in adulthood.

“As a team, we got together and brainstormed what common experiences we all had, the idea of doing a scrapbook and of looking back over the years.” Killick tells me. “In particular friendships and how they change [was a commonality]. Maybe you have a friend when you're young, you know things evolve, and maybe you drift apart as you get older. So that's kind of the inspiration behind the story.”

For a game with such a simple premise, it’s surprisingly emotional, as the items will evoke memories many players can relate to. During the demo, life events that made it into the scrapbook included moving house, starting a new school, making a friend, and going on a school trip. The vast majority of us will have experienced some, if not all, of these things in our lives. The items you see belong to Connie, but feel universal enough that they could be your own.

We found the emotional response very strong from people who play the game. People responded really well, even just to the short demo.

Killick explains, “Something I found is that players often come up to me afterwards and start telling me about their experiences with childhood friendship. Sometimes it turns into a bit of a therapy session because it's just such a common experience that people have where they've had friends and maybe they don't know why but they've drifted apart.”

This response didn’t surprise me in the slightest, since even playing for just a short amount of time was enough to make me think about my own childhood best friend, and the devastation I felt when she moved away. I switched from cosy to almost crying pretty quickly, yet still wanted to explore more of this beautiful game.

Pieced Together has been created by four women with a wealth of industry experience who came together with a common goal. “We're very experienced developers,” says Killick about her team. “And we've all come to the same point in our careers when we wanted to make something that we just felt really emotionally attached to, something a bit more heartfelt. So that's the kind of common ground that we all found.”

It came together over the past year, starting off as a game jam before being aided by the Wings Elevate Excelerator Program. The team are now taking the game around events with the aim of getting it into as many hands as possible and securing a publisher.

“Pieced Together is one of those games that to describe it doesn't quite do it justice,” says Killick. “You just need to play to understand why it has an emotional impact. So we just want as many people to play it as possible.”

Pieced Together is available to Wishlist on Steam.

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