Pieced Together is a cozy, heartfelt, narrative-driven game where you play the role of an adult, going through your childhood scrapbook, when you are suddenly reminded of your best friend. You start off writing a letter to her, but before that you revisit the moments when you were first creating this scrapbook.
I previously previewed the game after seeing it at a variety of different gaming events, where I very much liked the general vibe of what I saw. The way that it’s gone on to be completed, however, is fantastic. Writing the letter, which is where you get a lot of the main story from Connie, is completely voice acted and incredibly well done. Revisiting this letter aspect in-between chapters of the scrapbook pulls it all together.
Each of these chapters hit major milestones in Connie’s life. She’s moving towns, getting her first bestie, going on trips, having sleep overs, and getting ready for college. Many of the entries, especially at first, are positive and happy, but as she gets older, you start to find ones that are more muddled. Complex emotions with grief and sadness and worry starting to take shape.
The puzzles in Pieced Together are interesting. Sometimes you will be connecting sentences with phrases that need to be placed in the right area, sometimes you are piecing puzzles back together, other times you are cutting out pictures and placing them in the right place. There’s a good variety in these puzzles and it does keep things interesting throughout. Pieced Together does a good job of telling you when items aren’t in the right place either.
Pieced Together feels emotional. It’s a coming of age story that everyone can relate to – the looming decision of what your future will look like and if it will be with your best friend from school. There is a lot of extremely relatable moments. I played the game with Amelia and Robin on Xbox, where Amelia really started to get into it. There are moments when you are picking your responses and placing your spin on the story, which felt very much like her.
It can all be played in one sitting. There are a few chapters, but the story very much pulls you in. None of it feels pressured or repetitive. There are also these little stickers that you can find throughout, some of which include stickers from other cozy games that you can use to decorate pages. It’s a mix of puzzling and creating something adorable.
We played Pieced Together on Xbox and found some of the controls – particularly around cutting out shapes to put into the scrapbook and grabbing onto things such as the tray of items – to be a bit challenging for no reason. We felt that the PC version would be a bit easier, with cursor controls.
You can purchase Pieced Together on PC or Xbox.
