You can basically play all of Broken Age with just your mouse. These items are then used in specific situations to solve puzzles and progress the story, though it’s up to the player to figure out where they go or what they do. Of course, various items can also be picked up using this method. Clicking your cursor on the environment will cause your character of choice to walk over to that location, and certain characters can be clicked to have conversations with. Very short and it’s pretty obvious the game was never meant to be cut in half the way it is.The control scheme is both as traditional and simple as you can get with a conventional adventure game. The mix of serious themes and surreal imagery works effortlessly well.Ĭons: Extremely simple puzzles that offer very little challenge. Pros: Amazing artwork, great script, and pitch perfect voice-acting. In Short: Clever, funny, and thought-provoking, but even without the weight of expectations this is a surprisingly insubstantial and ephemeral experience. Instead it concentrates purely on being as charming and engaging as possible, which is fine and admirable but it can’t help but seem rather anticlimactic. Disappointment may be too strong a word for Broken Age but despite the spotlight it’s made for itself it makes no attempt to either move the genre forward or to recreate the old style in more exacting detail. ![]() Perhaps things will become more challenging in the second act but since that doesn’t have any kind of specific date, just sometime this year, it may be some while before we find out. And if you don’t believe us consider the fact that the game doesn’t even bother to have a help system. And yet for whatever reason you’re unlikely to be stuck on any puzzle for more than a minute or two, thanks to hammer-over-the-head clues in the dialogue and item descriptions. ![]() The game clearly worries that the more complex, abstract puzzles of old are too much for modern gamers but that surely defeats the whole point of having fans fund a game in the first place. In fact they seem to be there more out of a sense of tradition than any obvious passion from the developer. There are also plenty of puzzles to block your way, but although they’re certainly more complex brain-teasers than anything in any of Telltale’s games by the old standards they’re surprisingly simplistic. There’s certainly little in the way of Schafer’s normal caustic sarcasm, just gentle humour and amusing chortles, rather than riotous belly laughs. There are plenty of jokes but this is not really a comedy, despite the silliness inherent in many of the situations. A talking tree and a cloud god voiced by Jack Black are two highlights but the script is excellent throughout, maintaining a balance between absurdity and seriousness with consummate ease. ![]() The majority of your time is spent simply exploring the game world and talking to the game’s various bizarre characters. In terms of gameplay Broken Age is as old school as you’d expect, with no requirement for arcade skills at all. They’re both appealing characters and although at first there seems to be no story link between them the thematic connection, of wanting to escape their predetermined fates, is handled with pleasing subtlety. Shay lives in a spaceship where he’s mollycoddled by its overprotective computer, while Vella is about to be sacrificed to a monster by her village. Although to do so seems almost criminal given the gorgeous art style.īroken Age’s story features two very different characters: a young boy named Shay and a girl name Vella. There’s even a secret option to play it in a low res mode that make it look exactly like Monkey Island et al. It was never intended that way, and the plans were only changed when Schafer realised he was running out of money.Īnd yet, as long as you keep your expectations in check Broken Age is still pretty much exactly what fans had hoped for: a point ‘n’ click adventure game in the old LucasArts style. It is too short, at only around three hours long for this first act, and cutting the game in half only makes the situation worse. Unfortunately, we have to say that Broken Age is often no different.
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