Broken Age

The entire game has beautiful artwork as well as high quality voice acting. Act 1 sets up an interesting world, characters, and plot with mostly enjoyable puzzles, funny scenes, and interesting characters to meet in interesting locations. Act 2 immediately damages the plot and character of one of the main characters, has you in the exact same areas, has you talking to the same people, and features some very annoying and difficult puzzles that only waste your time and that is repeated multiple times. Some story elements don't make sense in the second act and the game abruptly ends. Conversations give you the option to skip entirely but doesn't let you skip to the next line of text if you would rather read. This could have been a great game if the second act could have kept up the quality of the first.

Broken Age Act 1 is absolutely genius. With a gorgeous art style, quirky characters, and fantastic voice acting, we are introduced to two unique worlds, and two intriguing protagonists, Shay and Vella. Both stories begin to explore some very interesting themes about coming of age. It's easy to fall in love with these characters, who are remarkably relatable despite their bizarre circumstances. The gameplay is also fun and mostly relaxing. The puzzles are just challenging enough to be satisfying and the ability to switch back and forth between the two storylines whenever you want makes it easy to immediately shake things up if you ever want a change of pace or scenery. Act 2, however, though it is just as visually stunning, and involves the same characters you have grown to love, does not provide a satisfying resolution to the emotional or thematic build-up established in Act 1. So many of the themes that made Act 1 so interesting seemed to be ignored or undone in Act 2. And the puzzles become dramatically more difficult, to the point of being frustrating. Overall, Broken Age is a visually stunning game with three-quarters of an amazing story. Most of it is engaging and fun, and I generally enjoyed the 10 hours or so it took me to beat it, but the ending did leave much to be desired.

To talk about Broken Age, we need to know how the game born. It was, in fac, a Kickstarter project. With the initial goal of 300000$, the Kickstarter quickly concluded with the insane amount of almost 4 milion dollars. So Double Fine decided to change the project: from a little flash point and click adventure game, to a big project, but with a common goal: return to the gold past of point and click games, those '90 so loved by LucasGames fans. After a while, Double Fine release Act 1 on all digital platforms, saying the amount of money they gathered was not enough to complete the game. Put it in Early Access would secure Act 2 release later. Act 1 was a pretty looking game: the artistic side is very good, even if background are not on par. But....the game was too easy. Easy puzzles, not so interesting story at least for one of two characters, extremely short (around two hours). But it was a start, an introduction to Broken Age world. Act 2 got a release on April: finally the game is complete. But again, Act 2 is a total fail. Double Fine seems to have rewritten the plot, leaving too many plot holes in and here. Important facts are never explained, resulting in a very weak story. This time the gameplay was changed according to fan feedback, but the puzzles present now are way too hard, without a reason. Too often the players is faced with actions to complete, without a hint on what to do in order to proceed. He will face the same puzzle, again, and again: it's clearly a move to artificialy increase game's lenght (around 8 hours, this time), but failing on providing a challenge or satisfaction. Puzzles are here only to make the player lost his time. There are just a bunch of new screens in Act 2: majority of them are used from Act 1, with some modifications. So again the player will face a lot of useless backtracking, in and there to gather stuff and proceed with the game. what happened to the 4 milion project? Why wasting money to hire big actors, which provide a great voice acting, yes, but if this means a repetitive game...why do that? Why waste reseources like this? Broken Age for sure is not a classic point and click a la LucasGames: too many issues. The artistic side, again, is great, but the title fails on providing entertaining, resulting boring, obtuse and generally an average experience.

Whilst many people wanted some kind of Monkey Island/Grim Fandango-ish setting from the Kickstart game the art style has drastically changed to something you'd normally find in a kids book. But if you look past that you'll realise it's a wonderfully detailed world (x2, one for each character) with many great characters and that witty charm & humour of the old. Don't be put off by the looks, instead immerse yourself with imagination and meet a talking breakfast spoon & a wolf who's been lurking on a spaceship and on land face against a giant monster who eats people as some kind of annual tradition. Also be aware there's 2 chapters to this game and the 2nd chapter isn't out yet, leaving the plot on a cliffhanger but the 2nd chapter will be a free update.