2. Broken Age General hints and tips

When you reach the start menu for the game, you will be faced with four options:

• Continue - you continue the game from your last auto or manual save.
• New Game - start a new game in any of the eight save slots
• Load Game - load any of your available saves
• Options - change the control configuration, sensitivity of the cursor, volume, and language, and toggle subtitles on/off. You can also view the credits here.

As mentioned above, the game gives you eight save slots. One will be taken by the game's auto-save function, giving you seven slots to use to make Manual Saves at really important times. I'll be letting you know when you need to make a Manual Save in case something goes wrong, but use the slots at other times to reduce the amount of back-tracking when you need to take a break. You can create a Manual Save by pressing the Escape button and selecting Manual Save from the menu options at the top of the screen.

If you have to reload a Manual Save to retry a part of the game that should award you an achievement, DO NOT enable auto saves. If you enable auto saves and then fail to meet the requirements for the achievement, the game will already have saved over your file with your failed progress. At this point, you will either need to load an earlier save or start another save file altogether. Once you have met the achievement requirements, make another Manual Save. You then have two choices.

1. Continue without autosaves, making sure to make a Manual Save file at regular intervals.
2. Quit out of the game, load up your latest Manual Save and enable auto saves so that the game will save your progress for you again.

Personally, I preferred the second option because then there was little chance of losing much progress if I made a mistake or the game happened to crash.

Although the control configuration can be changed, I'll be using the default configuration for the purpose of this walkthrough. In this game you will meet many people, all of whom have interesting things to say. You don't need to listen to all of their conversation options -- you can press Space to skip the dialogue and choose the next option. You can also press Space to skip most (but not all) of the cutscenes. When travelling from area to area, clicking the left mouse button twice can transition between locations much quicker.

I will be using specific formatting for this walkthrough to make it easier to see what is what. Bold text represents items that can be added to Shay/Vella's inventory. Underlined text represents people that you will meet. Text that is in "quotation marks" represents dialogue options. Locations will be in Bold text and Underlined. Throughout Shay's Acts, there will be numerous occasions where Shay will need to use the Spoon or Grabbin' Gary on different objects or people to earn two achievements. These occasions will be highlighted in text boxes.

I'll also use screenshots to help with locating objects. Useful objects will be circled in red. Useful people will be circled in blue. Grabbin' Gary locations will be numbered in blue. Spoon locations will be numbered in red.

Finally, it makes no difference whether you choose to play as Shay or Vella first during Act One. You can even swap between the two at any time. This is the same for Act Two. I will be starting with Shay first and playing Vella's story second in both acts, but it is completely up to you in which order you choose to play the characters.

Let's begin the story.