Broken Age: The Complete Adventure

I came to this game (well Part 1) as a Kickstarter backer having never played a DoubleFine game before, but I have played Grim Fardango, Day of the Tentacle and other LS adventures, and I expected an "old-school point & click adventure" in that vein. What I got was not an LS-style adventure, but a very modern adventure more akin to TellTale games like "The Walking Dead". The interface is completely rudimentary and obviously designed for tablets (no right-click!) which drastically limits the players range of ways to interact with the environment. In Secret of Monkey Island you had commands such as "Open" and "Close", "Push" and "Pull", "Walk To", "Use", "Pick Up", "Talk To", "Turn on", "Turn off" and so on. In Broken Age there's one command, "click", and that's it. In BA you just click your way through the content at your hearts content. The "puzzles" (I wouldn't even call them this as it's an insult to the word) are most simple imaginable, there's no way any human being could be stuck on them for more than a minute. In this game you click and you never miss, even the dialogue handholds you and tells you the answer to these "puzzles" via a character called Marek the Wolf and from the main character himself Shay who when you do get an item just tells you (via dialogue) what to do with it. The dialogue "hints" (lol) are just terrible, it's the Skyrim quest compass for the adventure genre.

Graphics: Beautiful 2D art in a 3D engine that allows for a unique feel. Colors are muted and painterly. This is definitely the game's strongest aspect. Sound: Background noises are amazingly good and add a lot to the atmosphere. The music is on the forgettable side. Voices: Calm performances from a celebrity cast for the English version. I would have preferred professional voice actors with a more unique style. Fortunately, you do get this with the German voice cast! They are great. Story and Dialogue: An interesting story with a lot at stake for the two main characters. The main dialogue is meant to be plain and not witty, which is probably the most dramatic change from old-school adventure games. Clicking on background objects will produce observations like, "This is a towel," which discourages exploration. Dialogue is used effectively to portray character in dialogue. "Mom" talks down to Shay in a cutesy way. A cult which requires members to drop vowels from words has variously-committed members who do or don't do this. Robots effectively portray intelligence which is being constrained through programming. Overall, the dialogue is great. World: A high-tech fantasy world with unexplained rules. Lots of bizarre things in the nooks and crannies. Every scene was therefore interesting, but overall the game world was lacking in coherence. Puzzles: The first act's puzzles...were there any puzzles? The second act is great. There are no puzzles out of context. There are callbacks and intricacies, and every part of your brain will be challenged. Exactly what I was hoping for! Final Word: Some pieces of the game are dull and ordinary, so I knocked off a star. But overall, this is a very good game. I haven't seen a point-and-click get so many things right is a long time. I hope now that the engine has been developed that other games with the same style will come out soon.

Overall it is good for what it is( whatever that abomination is) but the problem here is it is not what they claimed it would be and that is an old-school lucasarts style adventure game.There is almost not gameplay in it.There are only a handful of simple puzzles (use spoon with bowl WTF!!!!!) limited exploration, limited interaction (couple of hotspots per location and only 2 actions walk and a general braindead do all- yup not even examine) and well that's it. Broken age is a short casual interactive movie (heavy emphasis on dialogue/story, poor gameplay) designed for tablets/handhelds ( tablet friendly user interface damps gameplay even more) and aimed at a younger audience (overal simplicity/story-writing style ), and it would have been fine if their kickstarter was about something like that. Instead they lied about making an old-school lucasarts style adventure game for the pc.

Richly-imagined and lovely worldbuilding, characters and story. Great twists, hilarious dialogue with brilliant voice-acting, funny and clever puzzles, so much charm and attention to detail, and looks and sounds absolutely beautiful with its painted imagery and orchestral score. In the game you get to switch freely between two likable young teenage protagonists in very different worlds, rebelling against a system imposed on them, and as the player advances their storylines they can begin to see the connections between them and use that to get them to help each other out. Vella has the 'honour' of being offered as a sacrificial maiden to appease a monster attacking her village, but she decides to fight back instead. Shay has grown up on his own on a spaceship programmed to serve his every need and coddle him, and decides he needs to break free and try to make a real difference.