Broken Age Reviews

I like puzzle games. Monkey's island is one of my favorite games, I still will boot up old adventure games all the time.

You know what I won't boot up again? Broken Age. In Monkey's island there's a lot of fun and silly stuff the player does, In most games it's an enjoyable story, and Broken Age has a moment or two of that.

But it's a one or two note game, that tries to make a whole symphony.

The beginning of the game you get the choice between two characters, that seem unrelated. There's the girl who... seems to be immediately thrown into peril without ANY backstory, so much so that I thought I skipped a cutscene. Nope, just "hey you're going to be imperiled to start the story!" She has a mediocre world to explore.

Then there's the boy, and honestly I like the world the boy is in far more. Only thing is, that world goes on entirely too long, and the good parts of the world wanes fast. If the game stopped after the first act, it'd be a good recommendable game

But then in the second act, the game changes, and... it's not for the better in my opinion. It's got an interesting story arc there, but does nothing with it, and it seems that you have to go.... listen I try not to do this, but I need to talk about spoilers. It's a rather major spoiler, but if you want to know about the second act, it's below.



Then again the quality of a puzzle game is based on the quality of the puzzles, and the good news is most of the puzzles are simple and easy to solve. But that's also the bad news. They're too simple. Put round battery in the round battery sized hole. "Talking" usually makes things almost blatantly obvious and you have to talk to everyone at least once to get all your objects anyways.

Then there are the puzzles you don't get. If you miss a slightly puzzle, the game won't hint or help you along. You're stuck. Hopefully you know what to do (because the game won't help you if you get lost, or return to it after a couple months) but even if you know where you want to go, you better hope you know to do X and Y, because if not, you're going to stand around and have to just stare and hope it comes to you. Or go use a guide.

And yeah that will happen, 90 percent of the puzzles are "go elsewhere, get something and return to me" Where 10 percent are "you have an item that will work but we won't even hint at it." I know I'm annoyed at the easiness of the puzzles, but the esoteric puzzles don't even give you a hint if you're stuck. You just either get it or you don't.

Finally the story should be mentioned. While it's a story, it feels like it's a story written for the modern generation. Gone is the long exposition or talking. There's beautiful moments in games like Monkey Island, where Guybrush and Elaine will talk for almost 2 minutes without player interaction. In Broken Age there appears to be a rush. The game almost never spends more than 2-3 lines without expecting the player to hit a button to say something. You constantly have to choose something to say, so there's no elongated exposition.

Everything is rushed along, and quite a few parts of the game could use a little more talking such as the beginning of the game. The story never fully develops and now in hindsight I barely remember anything that was truly unique or I'd want to see again. I compare this to Monkey's Island again, where Elaine and Guybrush meeting, the three pirates, Stan the boat seller, and even the insult fighting are all amazing moments I could enjoy again and again. To me that was a better story, this well, this isn't what I was expecting when I funded the kickstarter.

It's a shame because while act one is acceptable, I can't in good conscious recommend this game to anyone. I'd recommend Monkey's Island, Grim Fandago, maybe the King's quest games, or the most games from Telltale game instead of this game. But Broken Age, it was an interesting Kickstarter, but not a very good game, sadly.

(Note I backed the game on kickstarter, I played the game on Ps4, as part of Playstation Plus. I did pay for this copy)

Broken Age is an old-school point-and-click adventure game. You play as two characters – Shay and Vella – and can switch between them at any point during the story.

This sounds neat, but unfortunately, while this sounds neat, for the vast majority of the story – indeed, up until the very, very end of the game – it is almost completely irrelevant. And unfortunately, in the bit where it IS relevant, it actually makes no sense. But I am getting ahead of myself.

Broken Age is an old-school adventure game. You have a (very small) inventory, though unlike some old games you can’t create unwinnable situations or nonsense like that. There are puzzles you have to solve in the world, primarily by taking inventory items, combining inventory items, and delivering inventory items to people/locations to solve problems. Some of the items have to be manipulated within your inventory – in particular, you get a robot later on in the game which you repeatedly have to rewire to perform various tasks on your behalf.

The actual story is split into two parts – Shay’s story is about him trying to escape from his rather controlling ship, where “Mom” (a woman’s face in a glowing orb) is rather controlling and has him do ridiculous “missions” which are all just fake adventures. Robots serve the roles of NPCs in these adventures, and it is only when Shay deliberately breaks one of the adventures that his story really begins, as a stowaway wolf (or, more accurately, man in a wolf costume) offers to help him find some REAL adventure – saving some innocent creatures. But he has to go around the ship and bypass various security and safety mechanisms in order to do it.

Meanwhile, Vella’s half of the story is that her people periodically sacrifice maidens to Mog Chothra, a tentacled flying monster. She has been chosen as one of this year’s sacrifices for her hometown, but she isn’t going to go down without a fight – this whole thing is stupid, and Vella believes they should fight the monster rather than appease it. This leads to her doing exactly that, and her going on an adventure which eventually results in her battling the thing.

The second half of the game has the characters switch places – Vella has to go through Shay’s ship, while Shay has to deal with Vella’s world. Both realize that not everything was as it seemed, as does the player.

Unfortunately, this reveals one of the three major flaws of the game – you basically spend almost the entire game backtracking back and forth across two fairly limited areas. The ship is smaller and quicker to go through than Vella’s area, which requires significant backtracking. Thus, even though there’s not that many areas in the game, the game as a whole takes nearly ten hours to complete. This can make the game feel a bit tedious at times, doubly so because there just aren’t many new areas to explore after the first half of the game.

The second problem arises from the fact that Vella’s part of the game is just generally more interesting than Shay’s ship. Shay’s ship has basically one joke, and it is repeated over and over again, while Vella’s area is more varied and has more interesting people to interact with. Vella herself is a kind of bland character; Shay is somewhat better, and his companion, a spoon in his inventory, is more interesting to drag around. It also is with him longer; Vella acquires a fork and knife, but they are less interesting NPCs and have fewer interesting things to say (though they, too, are amusing).

Alas, by the end of the game, the whole thing has worn a bit thin, and it felt like the central villains in the story don’t have a major role at all for a large portion of the gameplay due to Vella’s world being larger and longer than Shay’s. And honestly, the ending felt a bit rushed, with the bad guys apparently being thwarted, but half by accident, with everyone coming together to sing Kumbaya at the end in a kind of dubious way.

The third problem comes from the gameplay itself. It has some of the flaws of the old-school games, most notably the “Try to combine everything with everything and everyone” problem. There was at least one puzzle in the game that I only solved by trying to combine an inventory item with everyone in the game until it finally worked, as the vague hints were… well, vague. I knew I had to get an item from a “chain of deals” type thing, but I was missing an intermediate step and it took a bit to figure it out.

While it all made sense in the end, it still ended up involving a lot of backtracking.

A larger issue, however, lies in the endgame – there are some puzzles which are pretty obscure and require you to notice some symbols in the background of a photograph. Worse, this is not really called out in any major way, and it is extremely easy to miss.

However, the largest problem lies in the fact that this puzzle – along with a puzzle that Vella has to solve – require the characters to get knowledge from the other character’s section. BUT THERE IS LITERALLY NO COMMUNICATION BETWEEN THEM. It is purely meta – the player learns the solution in one half of the game, and then applies it to the other half. It makes no sense, and in the finale, this is even more blatant, as you constantly have to switch back and forth and use things learned from one half to apply to the other half. It is not at all obvious and it is, frankly, nonsensical, as the characters aren’t actually in active communication with each other. Once you realize that you have to use things from one half in the other, it does sort of come together, but while the idea of the two halves coming together was literally the only application of the “switch between characters” mechanic which was otherwise pointless, the fact that there was no in-character communication between them in order to do this is kind of annoying and feels very “gamey”.

Ultimately, I don’t think that this game quite came together for me. The endgame crossover puzzles aren’t the best thing in the world, and the story sort of felt like it never really came together as an exciting whole. There was a fair bit of humor, but the more serious side of the story felt kind of wonky, and Shay’s ship relied far too heavily on a single sort of joke and added essentially no fresh humor in the second half of the game.

There are better adventure games out there in the world, and while the humor in this is kind of cute, I’m not sure if it is worth 8-10 hours of your time.