Pieces of the Past Review - Organise, Repair and Clean Again
Pieces of the Past is the latest in a line of organising, cleaning, and repairing games, akin to Assemble with Care, A Little to the Left, and Undusted: Letters from the Past. You are tasked with fixing a series of items that remind the protagonist about their childhood, and you learn tidbits of information about their life as you progress.
The art style is clean and bright, and the soundtrack is lovely. It’s satisfying to scrub the grime off old objects with different tools. I enjoyed disassembling and reassembling mechanical items with lots of tiny components, but was disappointed to find that you don’t have to memorise the order that the various parts go in—the game will tell you if you have dragged the pieces across correctly.
This is not a challenging game. I’d hoped that the hand-holding would end after the first room, but features that felt like ‘tutorial mode’ continue all the way through to the end. There are a few repairs that involve gluing items together that could have been like a jigsaw, but the game automatically snapped pieces into their correct locations. I hoped items like a photo album or a scrapbook would allow me to have some freedom, but there is still a ‘correct’ place to put each item, so it becomes more about matching flowers to their ghostly outlines than making creative choices. Even simple things like which room you want to explore and in which order is unnecessarily gated. It would have been nice for the game to unlock a few rooms at a time, so—even though the player has to go into all of the rooms eventually—there is some semblance of choice.
Each of the rooms in the building belongs to a different member of the family. I want to say “house”, but it doesn’t really feel like one; the hallway connects to five bedrooms, and includes no bathrooms or kitchen. The story—which is voice-acted, in part—refers to the space as the protagonist’s childhood home, but it lacks realism. As you enter each room, the narrator keeps implying that they are cluttered, but the spaces actually feel quite sparse. Moving around each room, it’s obvious which items need repairs—even without their orange glow—because they are often the only object on each shelf. I understand why Pieces of the Past has included these 3D spaces to explore—it’s an interesting differentiating factor from some popular games in this microgenre—but I feel the choice has done the game a disservice by not fully executing on the premise. I would have preferred more objects be placed in one 3D space instead of spread around a larger series of rooms; it would have created a more cluttered and cosy environment without requiring the developer to make more assets.
I noticed a few bugs as I played, like cleaning sometimes occurring in places I wasn’t scrubbing or the final slow zoom on an object focusing on a weird angle that didn’t show any of the details I’d just spent time working on. On one occasion, I placed some pieces back together, and one of them zoomed off-screen. These little things weren’t particularly impactful, but they add up quickly when Pieces of the Past takes less than an hour to complete—which feels quite short for its price point.
Pieces of the Past is a perfectly fine addition to this microgenre, but feels a little too sparse and much too easy.
Pieces of the Past was reviewed on PC with code kindly supplied by the publisher.
