Video Game / Fractured

Fractured is a Puzzle Platformer Web Game made by Big Dino Studios, developed by GroZZleR. You must guide a boy in a big cap to the ghost of his mother, who narrates her plight in verse. It's a deceptively simple platformer, but the gimmick is that the screen is fractured, and pieces are displaced and twisted. What results is a truly disorienting experience as you must navigate this shattered frame to reach the boy's mother.

3 sequel games were released, each with the same gimmick, but different characters. Fractured 2 is about guiding a girl to the the ghost of her father. Fractured 3 has the POV character being both the boy and girl from the previous games, individually guiding each of them to the other's ghost. Fractured 4 features a different boy-girl duo who dress in blue, with each guided to each other's ghost, but the perspective is switched every two levels.

Each game carries a cryptic, melancholic experience, both in its soundtrack and the hopelessness of the narration, which is revealed piece by piece to form a poem.

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The Fractured game series has the following tropes:

• all lowercase letters: All the written narration is in lowercase, even uses of "i", "i'm", and "i'd".
• And Now for Someone Completely Different:
  • Fractured 3 has the girl from the 2nd game search for the ghost of the boy from the 1st game. Then, the boy navigates a Dark World to find the ghost of the girl.
  • Fractured 4 switches between (a different pair of) a boy and a girl every two levels, each of them being guided to each other's ghost, switching between a sunny world and a Dark World.
• Bonding over Missing Parents: The 3rd game features the boy and the girl from the last two games, in where they pursued the ghost of their parent only to ultimately fail. This game has them find each other's ghosts instead, and the ending scene has them sit side-by-side. It's inferred from the narration that they are the "two hopeful souls."
• Crate Expectations: There are crates in certain levels that the boy can push around to reach high-up places.
• Dark World: In the 3rd and 4th games, the girl walks through sunny levels while the boy does the same in a dark version of the world, where the green leafy trees are brown, the platforms are slightly cracked, and everything in general, like the sky and clouds, are significantly darker ^note (everything except the Lava Pits, at least). The title screens of both games depict the dark world to have brambles where they aren't in the sunny world.
• Desperate Plea for Home: The last sentence of Fractured 4's narration has the narrator, exhausted from being isolated and confused, wish she was home.
  i should just give up
  i'm sick of being something i'm not
  someone I'm not
  i just want to be home
  home... where i can just be
  me
• Ending by Ascending: In the 2nd game's final level, the girl walks up a flight of steps to jump to her father. Subverted when her jump just falls short and she falls off the level, which is meant to happen.
• Fission Mailed: The last level of the 1st game forces you to jump into the unknown, but when the pieces are rearranged, it's shown that there is no means to reach the mother. There are only her platform and her son's. The same applies to the 2nd game, without the pieces rearranging, but the girl walks up a flight of stairs before jumping to her father's platform... only to fall a little short of reaching him.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation: Downplayed. The 4th game's title screen depicts the boy to be in the sunny world, and the girl to be in the Dark World. In the game itself, their positions are swapped. Then again, each of them appear as a ghost in the area opposite of theirs for the other to find.
• Go Mad from the Isolation: Downplayed in Fractured 4's narration. While it doesn't state insanity outright, it describes feelings of dissociation, confusion, hopelessness, and eventual resignation from not being able to find anyone else, and ends with a Desperate Plea for Home. Unlike Fractured 3, where the boy and girl actually unite, the duo in this game seem to be futilely pursuing each other's ghosts, leaving them separated by the end with no one else in sight.
  hello
  can anyone help me
  looks like I'm on my own
  i need to figure this out
  this doesn't feel right
  everything looks the same
  feels the same
  but it doesn't feel like me
  why is this so confusing
  it's hopeless
  i'm alone
  there's no one else like me
• Hope Spot: The 2nd game appears to have a stairway for the girl to reach her father's ghost. The only place this level is fractured is between the final step and the ghost's platform, to conceal the fact that it's farther than it looks, and that the protagonist is still never meant to win.
• Interface Screw: The main gimmick of this level is the broken screen, which only reassembles itself when each level is beaten.
• Lava Pit: The 3rd game has pits of lava that, when fallen into, causes the level to restart. The lava itself appears as an unmoving slab of yellow and red.
• Leap of Faith: There is no apparent platform in the last level of the 1st game, only the boy in the bottom-left and the mother in the top-right. No matter where he jumps, there is no way to reach the mother.
• Light/Darkness Juxtaposition: The 3rd and 4th games feature a girl navigating a sunny world while a boy navigates a Dark World as they seek each other's ghosts, and the juxtapostion goes further than that in different ways for each game.
  • The narration of the 3rd game speaks of facing the darkness, finding the pieces in a broken world to make oneself whole, and finding hope despite it all. The final paragraphs contemplate that both the darkness and the light have their draws in spite of each other.
    though darkness covers most of the sky
    the stars will shine until their light breaks through
    and all my life, though I longed for the sun
    its light had always just cut off my view
    though darkness covers most of my sky
    the stars have always been waiting for me
    and through the darkness, came the light
    the lights of the stars that set me free
  • The title screen of the 4th game is split in half to juxtapose the two worlds and characters, as the girl appears to be floating in the dark world while the boy holds her hand while in the sunny world, and their expressions imply that they're desperately hanging on to each other.
• Merged Reality: Implied in the ending of the 3rd game. After the girl traverses a sunny world to seek the boy's ghost, and the boy traverses a Dark World to seek the girl's ghost, they're shown sitting next to each other, looking over the hopeful, sunny world... but then they both appear as ghosts in the dark world. Then they return to looking like their living selves while still in the dark world as the game returns to the menu. The narration caters a lot to Light/Darkness Juxtaposition and finding hope in a broken world.
• No Punctuation Period: Downplayed, while the narration text is void of question marks and periods (save for one use of ellipsis), there are always apostrophes where they should be, and commas do appear occasionally in the middle of some lines to divide two phrases.
• "Not So Different" Remark: The 2nd game's narration suggests that the ghostly father and his daughter that's searching for him are similarly stubborn.
  too stubborn to pause and love someone
  at the end, we were no different
• Numbered Sequels: The 2nd game is Fractured 2, the 3rd game is Fractured 3, and the 4th game is Fractured 4.
• Our Ghosts Are Different:
  • In the 1st game, the boy's mother appears as a pinkish-white apparition with Fog Feet. She fades with a vertical wipe upon being approached.
  • In the 2nd game, the girl's father is a bluish-white apparition who's always kneeling, and he raises his arms when his daughter comes near. He vanishes into a smoky swirl.
  • In the 3rd and 4th games, children apparitions are simply the same ghostly white with blue outlines, but without other ghostly features or disappearing animations. However, they are apparently depicted to be in two separate worlds, with the ghosts being the only way to interact with (or simply reach) the other.
• Parental Abandonment: The first two games feature children pursuing the ghosts of their parents. The details behind their abandonments can only be implied from the narration.
  • The mother's plight is knowing that her son that she "left behind" will continue searching for her, and there's nothing she can do about it.
  • The father suddenly disappeared after answering his daughter's question, as she heard his boots behind her and turned her head to find that he was gone.
• Pink Girl, Blue Boy: Zigzagged. The mother's apparition has a pink outline, while the father's apparition's outline is bluish-violet. However, the ghosts of the boy and the girl in the subsequent games are both blue.
• Shattered Sanity: Implied. The "fractured" state of the levels seem to symbolise the broken state of the characters involved, as supported by the poetic yet often bleak narrations. The children pursue the ghosts of their parents, only to fall away from them at the end of each level when the fractured visuals reassemble themselves. The mother that narrates the first game says she "[hears] the madness gloat." The narration of the 4th game has someone facing confusion and hopelessness from loneliness, and eventually resignation.
• Teleportation: In some releases of the 2nd game, such as on Coolmath Games, the father's ghost at the end of the level is replaced by a rectangular portal.

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