Broken Age

Really good game in my opinion, but you have to like this kind of games. This is about enjoying the characters and their story, thinking creatively to progress and solving puzzles. If you're the kind of person that only enjoys fast paced, very direct and dynamic games with a lot of action and reflexes involved you won't like this. If you've ever played monkey island, maniac mansion/day of the tentacle, grim fandango, etc. and liked it, you should definitely give this one a try. If not I would think twice before buying this. Voice acting, music etc is really good, point and clicking game fans will like this one.

I love the game but you basically need a walkthrough to play it and see the story through its completion. If you miss one thing you basically get stuck for many minutes. It doesn't help that it consumes a lot of time walking around in this game. There are also some mechanics that really needed to be explained such as combining inventory. I was literally stuck on that forever. This should've made things you can interact with a bit more obvious as some things completely blended in with the background that you wouldn't think to click. I also hated how you cant sprint your char nor fast travel as that took a huge chunk of the playtime, especially when you need to backtrack. With it being a bit more complicated the farther you get in the game as you have lots more to interact with and a bigger map I decided to give up as by that point I was just using a walkthrough as I missed somethings and kept needing to go back to do the next step of where I was

Double Fine being Double Fine. Beautiful art direction, good humor and pure creativity mixed with poor technical implementation, raw ideas and outdated gameplay. Pros: + Oh my, this watercolor art is mesmerizing. I don’t know how they made it, but it doesn’t feel digital. + I enjoy Tim Schafer’s sense of humor. It’s dark and kind and topical at the same time. He overuses wordplays (but I do the same). So tonally it’s perfect. + Voice acting is good in general. But Elija Wood is perfect as Shay. And Jack Black is welcome too, though he’s toned down here to fit into overall mellowness of the game (I want more of his eccentricity!). + If we started to talk about Jack Black, the subplot about the Cult of Lightness is the best part of the game. It’s funny. It’s smart. It’s very meta. + Solving some of the puzzles in Act 2 made me feel smart. Which was a feeling long forgotten in modern games which are very direct in their approach. Cons: - It’s a point-n-click adventure. And this genre died for a reason. This game has all genre problems: pixel hunting for missed objects, illogical puzzles and bad puzzle design in general (you will understand what I mean when you reach the knot one), monotonous backtracking through locations. Broken Age doesn’t propose any new gameplay mechanics and isn’t tested enough to avoid the old ones. - This genre is about puzzles. And puzzles are not great here. Act 1 is not a challenge whatsoever. But not in a feel-good ‘I’m making progress’ way, and more in a “there is no logic to what I’m doing, but let’s click here and see what happens”. Act 2 has more gameplay inside. But it’s very uneven. Some puzzles are nice. But others are undercooked (again, the knot one) or unnecessary convoluted. In the end, I referred to youtube 3 times to move forward, and each time it was not a disappointed “oh, why didn’t I think about that?“, but an angry “it’s just mean”. - Also, the studio made a questionable choice to make two puzzles the way that you’re need a peace of paper to solve them. At first, I felt annoyed and angry with. Cause it’s an outdated game design (especially after the shallow first act). In the end I appreciated it in the one puzzle (it’s more a nostalgia hit than good game design, but what works — works). But in the second puzzle I hated it. Because it wasn’t thinking in that case, just monotonous noting. And this old school puzzle design doesn’t fit the game world themes anyway. Common, it’s 2020 (ok 2015 at the original release). Be congruent, Tim! - As with any DB game this one is full of great ideas either executed poorly or dropped midway. Both story-wise, world-wise and gameplay-wise. The ”two worlds” mechanic is implemented poorly and un-evenly. The different towns feel like a pastiche not like a unified world. This technique worked in Psychonauts, because each level was in a new mind, but here there is no good reason for this. But it hurt the story the most. It tries to be very meta. But with no good internal storyline to support this. This game doesn’t have a hidden meaning or something. But it always nods that it does. And it gets old really fast and devalues all the stakes in the story. - And finally PS4 version is plagued by bugs. With some of them being unforgivable. Like not being able to see some of the items in your inventory because of the glitches above them or some lines of dialogue being muted. It feels like DF doesn’t care about its gamers at all. 5 years after release in such a small game some critical bugs are still not fixed. #facepalm

Broken Age is a game with great potential that ultimately falls flat due to what feels like an abrupt ending. While the artwork, dialog, voice acting, and central themes are executed extremely well, the story fails to bring it all together in the last five yards. The game does have its good points; I certainly had a decent laugh more than once at some of the jokes, and a couple of the puzzles really gave me an "aha!" moment when I finally solved them. Additionally, I appreciated the character switching mechanic, which really helped ease some frustration. While I'm not the biggest fan of point-and-click games, the earlier parts of Broken Age did keep me entertained. I would recommend this as a game for younger kids to play, as I feel like it has a good message and is a very wacky looking game. However, this one just wasn't for me.

Maybe I‘m too thick or perhaps we just don’t click like we used to? Either way, some puzzles in Broken Age were tough as nails. It’s a thoughtful and imaginative game but in equal measure, a chore wrought in guess work, cluttered with poorly realised puzzles whose inventiveness seems hazardous to their own brilliance. A staple of gaming in the late 80s and a decent chunk of the 90s, point-and-click adventures have always existed on one solid foundation: player satisfaction. Pioneers Lucas Arts and Sierra both nailed this mechanic and the smug realization when you stopped and exited the Tunnel of Love in Sam & Max Hit the Road or the gratifying way Space Quest IV lectured you for cursing (“what would your mother think”?) are no accident, but perfect examples of impetus driven almost entirely by ‘the eureka moment’. It’s these mini epiphanies that make all that pointing and clicking worthwhile, as ‘the point’, as far as the player can tell, is to be rewarded for their troubles. It’s a pity then when the re-birth of the genre, helmed by one its most beloved figureheads, fails not only to re-capture former glory but quite radically regress it – eliminating the logic and signposting (subtle in-game hints helping guide the player to a defined conclusion) that had helped give the point-and-click such a unique and intellectual essence. This lack of logic can be found all throughout Broken Age’s 4-6 hour lifespan but is most damning in the latter half of the game, when things really start to hit the fan. Cat-hair moustache bad? I won’t tar it with that brush but it’s well on its way. At this point in the story the player is asked to craft a makeshift hole-patch material from combination disgusting man-made broth and eggshell. Sure it sounds great but the path to the solution is far from rewarding. The goal here is to afford the slop a pH level of 9 so it can be used to patch up a spaceship. Figuring you have to plumb the depths of the purple-grey mess with your talking spoon (it makes a certain amount of sense in context), you’re told the pH is 7. A basic chat with your dad, the mastermind behind this plan, has you learn the acidic materials will lower the pH, whilst dropping in anything highly alkaline (say, a shell) will raise it. Alright – I’ll just drop in this shell I got earlier. “Just a minute” says Shay, one the game’s two main characters, “that’s a shell-shaped instrument, not a shell”. Here’s where the real fun begins… Depending on your capacity for arbitrary inventory mashing, the next 30 minutes to an hour of gameplay will see you traipsing backdrops, attempting to combine a fish with a snake and growing steadily more frustrated as you attempt to solve this bastard of a riddle. Through nothing more than process of elimination, the solution finally becomes clear – use the juice tapper from the guy in the tree to crack the egg of the bird that had previously attacked you every time you went near it, let alone when you tried to smash up its kid’s house with a blunt instrument. There’s no flow here nor reason and this laziness garnishes the whole game – the player asked to exhaust all possibilities before proceeding. Though dotted with imagination and some genuine fun, the elaborate and seemingly random nature of Broken Age distills it to nothing more than a disappointing irony, cruel in its purpose and choice of moniker. In attempting to recapture the inventiveness of its predecessors, its ambition has tipped the balance and now has it nowt more than a frustrating exercise in developer telepathy. Space Quest, Sam & Max or Monkey Island this game certainly isn’t, though it can now share a shelf with Assassin's Creed Unity and the Masterchief Collection as a herald of the broken Age (with apologies given to Broken Sword).