My childhood best friend got married recently. I wasn’t there. Over the years, we grew apart – and while we share grand memories of playing as kids, watching Doctor Who, connecting in Animal Crossing: Wild World and marvelling over the weirdness of The Sims 2 on Nintendo DS, we became very different adults. Her wedding unfolded over Instagram, and flipping through photos, seeing her so happy and so different, I felt sad to have lost in-person touch, and sad to realise how far we’d grown apart.
Previewing Pieced Together immediately after this was an exercise in devastation.
This upcoming title from Glowfrog Games is a scrapbooking sim that focusses on a young woman scrapbooking her childhood memories, while grappling with the loss of her childhood best friend. Alongside the scrapbook, she works on a letter to this friend, lamenting that they’ve grown apart – but needing closure for the relationship.
The nature and topic of the game caught me so unexpectedly off-guard that I found myself feeling overly emotional about Connie and Beth, and the nature of young friendship. It’s so rare to see it represented in games, and to have such a real connection to a narrative like it. I strongly suspect Pieced Together speaks to a universal experience that is just rarely spoken about.
Young female friendships are often explored in alternative media – YA novels and books for younger kids – but it’s scarcely touched in video game form. The way Pieced Together puts you in Connie’s shoes, experiencing her memories, makes it all the more personal, and all the more relatable.
You begin Pieced Together with the penning of a letter from Connie to Beth. It’s a serious letter, and several scraps are thrown out before the real narrative begins. It’s clear that Connie is emotional, and that she’s working through awful, guilty feelings as a 30-year-old reckoning with the impact of a friendship breakup. It’s not clear exactly what happened – and in my preview, the mystery was not close to solved – but it serves as a lynchpin for the narrative, keeping you guessing as you work on Connie’s scrapbook, piece by piece.
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In each level of this game, you are given a small slice of narrative in memory form. Connie recalls moving to a new town, going to school, going to the museum, hosting a birthday party, and making friends with Beth.
Your job, as Connie’s stand-in, is to gather stickers and tokens to form the scrapbook, identifying which pieces are most related to her memories. If you’ve ever scrapbooked yourself, you’ll find the process particularly cathartic – there’s movie tickets to find, little scraps of subway tickets, mini-polaroids, collectible stickers, and the like. (I have a particularly cheesy childhood scrapbook that still contains my one and only ticket to Wonderland Sydney, which I cherish.)
In the laying out of Connie’s scrapbook, Glowfrog Games has also made clever choices about placement, and how pieces are placed. On one particularly devastating page in the game’s preview, Connie scrapbooks about a childhood birthday party that didn’t quite go the way she wanted.
At first, you’re placing a photo depicting a fun birthday scene, and pasting a birthday coupon. Then a sticker, then an invitation. The scene is bright and bubbly. Then, you find the responses from your classmates: Sorry, I can’t come. The screen gets a bit darker. Sorry, I can’t come. Darker again. Sorry, I can’t come. The colour is completely washed out, and you can feel the heart-wrenching emotions swirling in Connie.
But then, Beth saves the day with a yes. She turns up to the party, the world gains colour again, and everything seems brighter. It speaks to the power of friendship as a young girl: the way friends can light up a room, make you feel seen and whole, justify your interests and proclivities, and salvage planned events.
It’s wonderful to see the evolution of Beth and Connie’s friendship over the next chapters, as they visit various locations together, and adult Connie records her most positive, happy memories. But every so often, the framing narrative creeps in with a sense of dread. You’re constantly reminded that while Connie appears happy in the scrapbook, there are darker events ahead.
In this tonal difference, Glowfrog Games crafts a compelling narrative – and one that I desperately want to see more of. The game speaks to my experiences entirely, in a way that does make me feel seen, and makes me feel better about losing my own childhood best friend.
I expect the game will explore the acceptance I’ve struggling to grasp in recent weeks: that we all grow up, and move on. We become different people, and we can’t hold onto who we were for the sake of memories. We all meet new people, and make new friends. Sometimes, memories aren’t enough to keep a friendship going.
Pieced Together feels like it will be a very important game, in that regard. After a brief taster at SXSW Sydney 2024, I’m ready to be completely shattered by its full narrative.
Pieced Together is currently in development, and does not have a firm release date.
