“Every truth has two sides; it is as well to look at both, before we commit ourselves to either.”
–Aesop

Broken Age is another quirky, imaginative, modern classic by Double Fine Productions and director Tim Schafer. It’s an adventure game in ye olde point-and-click style of which we were all so fond several decades ago. A dying breed, to be sure. One of the best funded Kickstarter projects of all time, Broken Age was released in two parts known as Acts, first in 2014 and the second in 2015. It’s success on Kickstarter has since established crowdfunding as an effective means of getting video games out to the world.

The game follows the point-and-click gameplay formula pretty much to a T. The objective is to solve a series of contextual puzzles and advance the storyline. Moving the cursor across the screen directs the playable character to speak with members of the cast or interact with items such as combining them or giving them away. However, as opposed to many early adventure games there’s no huge list of verbs at the bottom of the screen, which streamlines a previously tedious style of gameplay. Thank Schafer for that.

Similar to some of the old LucasArts adventures, there are multiple playable characters that must be switched between in order to complete all of the puzzles. Some of these are really tough. This is an example of a game that I’m convinced is impossible to complete without a walkthrough, though with the accessibility of the internet today compared to 20 years ago, it’s easier to find a walkthrough than ever. That’s not to say that Broken Age becomes “easy”, though. It pulls an old adventure game trick from its sleeve: some of the puzzle solutions are unique to each individual copy of the game. The only way to complete them (the hexipal wiring puzzle) is to figure out the mechanism of the puzzle first and then figure out the unique solution for your own copy. That’s a genius way to circumnavigate guide abuse to get through the game.

A new game will prompt you to choose between two characters with separate storylines which eventually converge: a girl in a fantasy world and a boy in a science fiction world. You can switch between the characters at any point during the game.

Click here for the full thang... https://thewellredmage.wordpress.com/2016/11/27/br...

For anyone who's played a game directed by Tim Schafer, you would probably agree when I say that this is a very Tim Schafer game. The game is very much filled with his quirky style and writing. Both the writing and the voice acting for the characters is superb, and the story is driven nicely by snarky but goodhearted player characters.

My biggest problem with this game was that it has very inconsistent puzzles. While some adventure games are more about story and narrative, Broken Age pretty clearly puts forth its intentions to give the whole "solve puzzles with combinations of items" thing it's fair shake. The earlier gameplay is pretty clean with the characters organically providing hints when prompted by inspecting obstacles and attempting solutions. The second part, however devolves into some extremely obtuse leaps in logic and some solutions that are a little absurd. I think this would upset me less if the first part of the game didn't feel so nicely balanced between exposition and challenging but reasonable puzzle gameplay.

Regardless, I found the experience worthwhile because of the sheer charm of the world and the characters. There are pieces to the setting that I wish were more fleshed out, but given the scope of the game and the story it told, I'm pretty satisfied with its treatment. If I could, I'd give 3.5 stars. The game has some issues with puzzle gameplay, and the world can feel a tad unexplained and restricted sometimes, but there's an inescapable creative flair to the art and writing that makes Broken Age worth completing.

I recommend you play with the expectation of having to maybe crack open a guide; I'm pretty stubborn about avoiding guides when I play games like this but I ended up using one anyways. There's a nice "spoiler-free" walkthrough on IGN that attempts to feed you a series of hints instead of direct answers, and I found this to be a nice middle ground.

I don’t think I’m going to say very much unique about Broken Age, which is a beautiful but ultimately flawed example of the Point and Click genre. Which, in the context of Tim Schafer’s point and click output, is remarkably consistent. I have no doubt that Broken Age will be someone’s favorite — like Grim Fandango or Full Throttle, it has enough going for it in terms of art, style, and dialog to be both universally charming and, for its most resonant audience, infinitely fan-art-able.

Broken Age tells two stories simultaneously: Shay, a young man living alone on a spaceship run by an overprotective computer that calls itself Mother, and Vella, a young woman who decides she’d rather not be fed to local Cthuloid horror Mog Chothra. The player can switch between the two characters at any time, and discover how their seemingly separate worlds are connected.

As a point and click adventure enthusiast, I found the puzzles in this game to be good to great for the most part, with only a couple of point and click sins committed, just to remind us of the genre’s marketing fragility. The game employs context-sensitive actions instead of using verb lists as early adventure games would use, making it more accessible and intuitive. The game also features an impressive voice cast that includes Elijah Wood, Jack Black, Jennifer Hale, Wil Wheaton, and Pendleton Ward who bring life and personality to the characters.

But what was really just frustrating and disappointing was the actual execution of the overall story of the game. Gang, this thing felt very strongly like they ran out of money before being able to do Act 3. After being so compelled and enthralled by the storytelling and world building of the game, the ending was rushed and unsatisfying, leaving me feeling cheated out of a proper conclusion.

I suppose that the more optimistic reading of that is that the game is wonderful enough to make me want so much more. But they needed to “‘Wow’ them in the end”, not wrap things up with vague sketches over the ending credits.

I really really wanted to like this game, but for some reason I just didn't. I appreciate the effort that has gone into it, but sadly I didn't find the game enjoyable, which is a real shame.

There are a lot of things to like about the game: the artwork , the voice acting, the soundtrack, the humour. The story is interesting but I started to care less and less about it as the game went one. By mid-way of Act 2 I just wanted the whole thing to be over. The puzzle aspect, I think, actually started to hinder the story rather than add to it. You seem to spend a lot of time running backwards and forwards from one end of the world to the other, sometimes doing the really obvious things, sometimes reaching new levels of frustration. Once each puzzle was solved I wasn't feeling a sense of reward, just relief, more of a "thank god for that" etc.

Maybe I have fallen out of love with the old-school type point and click genre, or has the world and its expectations just moved on? There are currently some truly excellent story driven adventure type games available, I'm really sorry, but I don't think this is one of them (the credits at the end are nice though).