Kickstarter pieced together for Fractured Hearts

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Announcements by Jack Allin
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Sci-fi adventure from the creator of Detective Hard-Boiled and Trails and Traces due out next year

Indie developer Matt Barker of Because Because Games has taken us on a modern-day pirate search (Trails and Traces: The Tomb of Thomas Tew) and a spoof-filled mystery (Detective Boiled-Hard), not to mention several other freeware adventures that preceded his commercial work. For his next act, however, Barker is setting his sights a little higher: all the way to an alien planet, in fact, in the upcoming Fractured Hearts, though he's going to need a little Kickstarter help to do it.

Maxine is the security officer for a "badly managed spacefaring company" who sends her on a mission into space to investigate an unknown power source, accompanied by her best friend, a robot named Jonas. Unfortunately, the ship crash lands on an alien planet that bears a striking resemblance to modern Earth, and Jonas is sent hurtling through the atmosphere and smashed into several pieces. Only Jonas can repair the ship, so if they're ever to get home again, Maxine must track down his parts to restore him. The problem is, the residents of this planet manage to locate them first, and after finding "inventive ways to utilise them, they're not eager to part with these new quality-of-life improvements."

While the developer's previous games have relied on a pixel art aesthetic, Fractured Hearts is the first to feature pre-rendered 3D backgrounds and characters, though the controls still feature a simple point-and-click interface. There will be more than thirty distinct scenes to explore across three central locations: the spaceship, a quaint town on the alien planet, and a "forbidden laboratory" run by the military. While the stakes are high, the game's tone will be lighthearted, with a primary focus on "well-designed and fun puzzles" to get Maxine and Jonas out of their predicament.

In order to devote himself full-time to the project, Barker has launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise £4,000 by November 15th. If crowdfunding is successful, we should see Fractured Hearts launched on PC as soon as August 2024. Which still gives you plenty of time to check out the developer's previous games if you missed them the first time around. Detective Boiled-Hard is already on Steam and itch.io, while Trails and Traces is currently only on itch.io but is coming soon on Steam.