Broken Pieces haunts its virtual coast with eerie specificity – GDC hands-on impressions

gamepur.com:

Elise is alone. The game in which she stars, Broken Pieces, is a lonesome experience. In it, Elise explores the abandoned french seaside town of Saint-Exil, armed only with a handgun, a magical puzzle-solving bracelet, and whatever materials she can find. However, she is no outsider. Elise lives here, somehow the only one left behind in this catastrophic event. The game is slated to release later in 2022, but I played around one hour of an early portion of the game and interviewed core designer Mael Vignaux, virtually, at GDC.

Broken Pieces, at least in the demo I played, is not especially scary. It is, however, magnificently eerie. It lacks the hazy ambiguity of something like Silent Hill, but rather relies on a haunting specificity. Saint-Exil is not an amalgamation of Americana or a wasted world, but rather an ordinary French village where things have gone very wrong rather recently. The streets are deserted and enemies do appear, but it feels like an ordinary morning could start at any time, that if Elise walked into a Café she might find people mulling about and be able to order a coffee and a pastry.

That sense of almost-life comes out of the developer’s experience inside French seaside villages. Vignaux lives in a town much like Saint-Exil. However, it’s not so much that the game takes place in the town where the developers live, more that they wanted to play in a similar place, with “the same kinds of buildings.” I’ve never lived in rural France, so my opinion on “accuracy” is moot. Nevertheless, the impression is one of simulacrum. Glittering cobblestone streets, blocky and small European cars, as well as plaque-laden historical sites grant Saint-Exil a particular character. The team’s