I have never thought about scrapbooking in my life, not even a little bit. I’m not an artsy person, so when I’ve occasionally heard it mentioned in passing, my brain would instantly turn off. I didn’t need to know one thing about scrapbooking to get by in life, and I knew it wasn’t something I’d ever personally pursue.
Despite this, I felt drawn in by Pieced Together, a scrapbooking game from Glowfrog Games. Because while I’ve never thought about scrapbooking, I have thought a lot about lost friendships over the years, and that is the central theme of the game.
It’s always wild to think about all the people who have come in and out of my life that helped shape me in both big and small ways. While I try very hard to maintain friendships with people that I care about, there are always going to be some cases where this just isn’t possible for one reason or another. We have finite time, and as we grow older and get careers, have kids, or distance comes into play, there are always going to be some who are left behind.
Pieced Together is a story about this kind of lost connection, and I think anyone who plays it is guaranteed to remember at least one person that they haven’t talked to in a very long time. I spent several sessions playing this game feeling a bit wistful about the past in a good way. But also, much to my surprise, it taught me that scrapbooking is kind of neat!
The BigNerdScrapbooking Spin Off Blog I’m Working On Is Going To SLAP
You play Pieced Together as Connie. She is going through old pictures and other items to put together a scrapbook to remember her past. The focus of the scrapbook is Beth, who was her best friend for about a decade through school.
With each page, the game gives you a collection of pictures and items (like ticket stubs), and your job is to pick out the ones that fit within the theme/time period of that specific page and place them in the book. For example, during the page about Connie’s 11th birthday party, you only want to put in pictures specifically from that birthday party. It’s simple enough. There isn’t much actual puzzle solving within these pages, but this aspect of the game taught me how cool scrapbooking can be as a tool to remember the past. Generally, if I want to remember a specific event, I’ll pull out my phone and find the pictures from that moment. Scrapbooking is neat because it stylizes these memories. It’s cool to not only have the pictures from an event but also the invitations and other items as well. Finding a way to organize all of these items on a page in a way that is visually appealing is kind of its own optional puzzle. It somehow makes reliving these memories just a bit more fun and satisfying, even though they aren’t actually my memories.
The game also gives you stickers to help fill in the blanks. So on certain pages, when I felt there was a bit too much dead space between pictures, I could fill in some of that space to style things the way I wanted. For example, the game has birthday themed stickers in one of its packs that would fit well on that birthday page. I was surprised with how often I was taking the time to pick out stickers and do this even though it’s totally optional. I was doing it because I was genuinely taking pride in making each page look nice. It helps that the game has some really nice looking pages, stickers, pictures, and other items that make it easy to make each page look decently visually appealing.
As Pieced Together goes on, it keeps the scrapbooking, but kind of throws away the *actual* scrapbooking, and transitions into more of a puzzle game. While you still use the scrapbook, most of the pages you put together don’t really make sense as a scrapbooking item (like one involving figuring out where your cat was when it was lost in the past). At first, this kind of annoyed me, as I was enjoying the traditional scrapbooking, and these “puzzle” type pages didn’t really make sense to stylize most of the time. But as I went on, I realized that this was probably a smart move. I think that the standard scrapbooking gameplay might have gotten a bit old in the back half of the game otherwise. The puzzles help mix things up a bit. They don’t really involve tons of challenge, but just enough, and I think that fits the general vibes and themes of the game.
While Pieced Together is perfectly functional on Steam Deck, it isn’t totally optimized for it and feels like it is by far best played with an actual mouse. I won’t hold that against the game, but one of the reasons the standard scrapbooking might have gotten old after a while is that the controls are slightly slow and imprecise on the Steam Deck. My only other real complaint with the gameplay is that there is no way to flip the pages backward at any point that I saw. I feel like the point of a scrapbook is to relive memories. It would have been nice to go back through old pages and admire my past work without the gameplay element, the way I imagine most people enjoy their scrapbooks. Otherwise, I think the game utilizes its formula pretty dang well.
This Is Nice, But I’d Kinda Like To Get To The Tragic Stuff Now
You put together the scrapbook chronologically, so the story in Pieced Together slowly shows you the journey that Connie and Beth’s friendship goes on over the course of about a decade. It’s a simple but relatable story to watch evolve. I think the coolest thing that this friendship showcases is the effect that our childhood friendships can have on our lives, even if they are no longer someone that we see anymore. Connie becomes significantly more adventurous thanks to Beth, which has a massive impact on where her life goes. Meanwhile, Beth becomes a bit more responsible and organized thanks to Connie, which ends up greatly altering where her life may have ended up otherwise.
However, I wished that the story focused a little more on the process of how Connie and Beth drifted apart. The last chapter of the game very cleverly uses an in-game social media service to showcase the way that a friendship can slowly fall apart when proximity is no longer there. A few missed events, a few unanswered messages, and a few hangouts that aren’t quite the same can change everything. But I think it was a mistake to only use one of the six chapters to go over this, as I’d still say this is the most compelling part of the story and the central theme that the game is based on. While it’s very easy to piece together what happened with the friendship, the game could have gone into it with way more detail, and I think the “invisible break” that happens would have hit harder with more time and effort put towards telling that part of the story.
This One Is For You, Matt
The death of Connie and Beth’s friendship inevitably made me reflect on what friendships I have lost over the years. My faded friendship story mostly plays out the way this one does, as I’m sure it does for many. Much like Connie, I made my best friend through middle school and high school when I entered a new school. This friendship easily became the most important in my life for many years, but once I went away to college, it slowly broke down. The meet-ups when I came back from school became less frequent, the connection slowly withered, and then one day, without it being planned or having some official “break up,” we just didn’t talk anymore.
However, it’s easy for me to look back now and understand the influence this friend had on my life in many ways. I recently wrote about how nervous I was to show off some of my nerdier traits when I first entered middle school. This friend liked nerdy activities, but was unequivocally himself about it. He didn’t care what anyone thought. He just did what he wanted to do. This was such an important thing for me to learn, and I learned it from him above anyone else. Even though there’s a chance that I never see this friend again, our relationship will always be a part of me because of that, and plenty of other reasons.
That friend’s number is still in my phone (though, who knows if he still uses it). There’s been a time or two where I’ve thought about reconnecting in at least a minor way. But I’m not sure how it would go. It could be a bit awkward, and odds are that it wouldn’t go anywhere. But it’d also be nice to have the closure that never really happens when most friendships end. Pieced Together goes a bit into that decision of whether to hit “send” or not during its ending, and I enjoyed the way it concludes.
While I think there are a few ways where Pieced Together could have… been pieced together a little better, I’m grateful that it gave me a space to think about a few people that I’ve left behind and the influence that they have had on me. I also think it’s cool that it taught me a little bit about scrapbooking. I doubt that I’ll ever scrapbook in real life, but I will certainly be open to more scrapbooking video games in the future. Essentially, even though I might forget that I played this game in a few years, it has left a little impact on me that will continue to live on in both life and video games. That’s something worth celebrating, and even though I’m now done with the game, I’m glad it was in my life for a short while.
Score: 7.5/10
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