Wouter & Ymke 
Do you remember those old point-and-click adventure games where you clicked on pretty much everything, collected a bunch of strange objects and then tried to figure out where on earth you were supposed to use them? Fragments: Solara brought back some of those memories for us, even though everything happens with illustrated pieces of cardboard spread across the table.
Fragments: Solara is a cooperative puzzle adventure set on a desert world with two suns. You follow Larna, a young nomad searching for her missing companion, on a journey towards a mysterious tower. You’ll explore her world through illustrated fragments, connecting objects and locations as you work your way through the story. We’ll leave the premise there, because discovering what happens is a large part of the game.
IELLO is bringing Fragments: Solara to Spiel Essen ’26, and we had the chance to play through the adventure beforehand.
👥 1+ players, ages 12+
📝 Designer: Yohan Servais
🎨 Artwork: Noëmie Chevalier & Jiahui Eva Gao
🏢 Publisher: IELLO (review copy provided)
Gameplay Overview
Before starting the main adventure, there’s a short tutorial explaining how the fragments work. It doesn’t take long, and once you understand the different types of connections, there isn’t much more to learn in terms of rules.
During the adventure, you’ll remove numbered fragments from their punchboards when instructed. They can represent locations, objects, characters and other parts of the world. You begin with a small selection and gradually add more as you progress.
Some fragments connect like regular jigsaw pieces and stay together permanently. Others have zigzag edges and can be connected temporarily. Each fragment represents something in the world, so you’re looking for connections between objects and locations rather than trying to complete one large picture.
A correct connection might tell you to turn over a fragment, take a new one from its punchboard or continue reading the story. Sometimes you’ll also need to use information or elements shown on the fragments themselves.
Information in the story and illustrations can be needed to progress, which also makes Solara quite language-dependent. You’ll need to understand the text rather than relying on symbols and pictures alone.
You can work through the adventure at your own pace. If you’re stuck, the solution booklet provides help step by step, allowing you to read one hint and return to the game before revealing anything else.
Artwork & Components
The fragments are thick cardboard pieces, initially stored in punchboards. Some look vaguely like traditional jigsaw pieces. Others don’t look much like anything until you’ve discovered where they belong. The punchboards keep everything organised and prevent you from seeing pieces before the game tells you to use them.
Noëmie Chevalier’s illustrations use plenty of warm oranges and yellows for Solara’s desert setting, with characters, buildings and smaller objects worked into the different scenes. You’ll spend quite a bit of time inspecting them rather than simply admiring them. A small object in a scene may be just as relevant as the more obvious things around it.
By the end of our adventure, the table looked very different from when we’d started. Fragments had been connected and turned over, with plenty of loose pieces still spread around them. I liked being able to look across the table and see the places and objects we’d encountered during Larna’s journey.
One practical warning: don’t throw away the punchboards. You’ll need them to properly reset Solara afterwards. That’s useful to know before those empty sheets of cardboard disappear into the recycling bin.
Our Experience
We played Fragments: Solara with the two of us in one sitting, as we usually do with this kind of game. The main adventure took us almost two hours. We weren’t paying much attention to the time and were genuinely surprised afterwards that we’d been sitting there for that long.
Most of the time we were both staring at the same fragments and throwing ideas back and forth. Quite often, one of us noticed something without immediately understanding why it mattered, and the other made the connection. That’s fairly typical for Ymke and me. I’ll point at something and announce that it must be important, apparently leaving the less glamorous task of figuring out why to Ymke.
We spent quite a bit of time picking up fragments we’d already inspected and checking parts of the story again because we’d clearly missed something. At some point logic briefly left the room and we started trying pieces together simply because they might work. Anyone familiar with old adventure games probably knows that stage. We reached it in Solara too.
Twice we got properly stuck and reached for the solution booklet. Both times we’d overlooked something. Once the hint pointed us in the right direction, the answer was obvious enough that we mostly wondered how we’d missed it.
By the second half of the adventure, we genuinely wanted to know where Larna was going and what we’d find there. That wasn’t really something we’d thought much about when we started. Playing the whole thing in one sitting suited us, and we never reached a point where we felt like putting it away and continuing another day.
Our Thoughts
What I like most about the system is that making a connection isn’t simply the game checking whether you’ve found the right answer. The connection is the action itself. You’re using something, changing part of the world or discovering what happens when two things interact. That’s where the point-and-click comparison makes the most sense to me.
The puzzles also ask for a particular kind of thinking. We were often combining several small bits of information: something we’d read earlier, an object on one fragment and a detail somewhere else on the table. Sometimes you can already have a good idea which fragments are involved and still need to work out what you’re actually supposed to do with them. Blindly trying combinations therefore doesn’t get you very far. Understanding the situation is usually more useful than simply finding two edges that happen to fit.
Quite a few interactions are straightforward, and we’re fine with that. We don’t need every object Larna encounters to become a separate brainteaser. Players mainly looking for difficult riddles and codes may find parts of Solara too easy, because that’s not where most of its puzzles come from.
The biggest limitation is replayability. There basically isn’t any. Once you know the story and the solutions, there’s little reason to play Solara again with the same group. Nothing is destroyed, so we can reset our copy and pass it on, but this remains a one-session game. That’s the main drawback I’d keep in mind with Solara.
Finishing it did make us curious about Fragments: Fungataï, a separate adventure that uses the same system across four connected chapters. I’d like to see what happens when these ideas are used across a longer story. Solara itself is finished for us. We know its secrets now, and our copy can go to someone who doesn’t.
📝 We received a review copy of Fragments: Solara from IELLO.
Going to Spiel Essen ’26? We’re reviewing a selection of this year’s new releases. You can find all our other Spiel ’26 reviews here.
