Broken Pieces, the first venture by the current team at French developer Elseware Experience, is out now for PC, but console gamers will need to wait more than seven extra weeks to get their hands on it. Publisher Freedom Games will be releasing the psychological thriller for both current and last-generation Xbox and PlayStation consoles, but somewhat appropriately, the team will not make it available until Halloween.
As described by the game’s officialpress release, the gam’s action and plot will center around a lone female protagonist, Elsie, as she pulls the curtain on a mysterious cult while in search of her fiancé. The official gameplay trailer showcases a mixture of combat against various types of creeping and flying shadow monsters along with a variety of puzzle-solving scenarios. The players will be able to make use of a weapon crafting system to aid them in combat and gain access to special powers, such as weather control, to solve puzzles and progress through the plot.
While Broken Pieces takes place in the fictional, and eerily empty, French village of Saint-Exil, developers have designed the game’s mysteries and puzzles around the real-life Brittany peninsula region of France. This setting combines with storyline elements that place the quaint but unsettling village in a state outside of time. But the overall emptiness of the world, and general lack of interpersonal interaction or a soundtrack — accessible only by playing cassette tapes left behind by Elsie’s missing fiancé — was by design.
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“The sense of isolation was our biggest focus and we have explored that in a number of ways one only can in video games," Project Lead Mael Vignaux said via press release. “There is little to no background music, no NPCs to keep you company, just a portable camera that feels like it’s stalking you through the town. I think everyone can relate to that emotion and being able to convey what Elise is also feeling is something we hope people can really empathize with.”
The team at developer Elseware Experience is composed of Benoît Dereau, who served as a level artist/architect for Arcane Studios and Bethesda Softworks' 2012 action-adventure hitDishonored, and Mael Vignaux. Broken Pieces marks a new direction for the company, which in the past has focused on thought-provoking virtual reality educational software, such as Artefacts VR, a digital environmentalist exhibition showcased in the Berlin Museum of Natural History. As with most of its virtual reality projects, Broken Pieces utilizes Unreal Engine 4.
The game is currently available on Steam and Epic Game Store. While its selling price is set at $24.99, the publisher is offering it at an introductory rate of $19.99 through September 16.
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