Broken Age: The Complete Adventure

Broken Age was meant to be the ambassador for classic-style adventure games in the modern era but with its second act, Double Fine risk turning more players away from the genre than turning them on. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUWoGh2TqKg

La mia recensione in italiano la trovate su steam (per varie ragioni che spiego proprio nella recensione): http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198148248888/recommended/232790 Let's start. - Story: 9/10 I think the story is really good. The only real problem is the final villain. - Puzzle: 8/10 I played only some good graphics adventures (Grim Fandango remastered, The Longest Journey, The Book of Unwritten Tales etc...) and I think the puzzles are usually really good in Broken Age, only 3-4 of them are not so good (still there are no puzzles too difficult or too easy). - Tecnic 10/10: No bugs and dropbox save sync. A really good way to play everywhere with no steam features. You can easy share save between steam and gog, desktop and mobile version of Broken Age. - Artistic 10/10: It's like play in a painting. - Duration 8/10: 12 hours. Not really long, not so bad. I think the game is really balanced between act 1 and act 2. There are few more scenarios in act 2, but many scenarios change a lot. I can undestand that divide the game in 2 act is not really good (they decided to use many famous artists, but with the use of not famous (but still good) artists and/or with the creation of only one story (Shay or Vella) they could save many money and still make a great game).... But I cannot undestand how critics the quality of Broken Age (that I think deserve a 5/5).

I don't own the pc version, but seeing it here I have to give a review. I used to play games from Sierra like this, games like king's quest and space quest. This game is similar, a point and click exploration game; but with fantastic unique art work coupled with great actors. Being older now I typically don't play games like this anymore, but this one was special; there is a lot of unique comedy bit's that would make anyone giggle at least once or twice. I give this game five stars because, even though it is a short game and most puzzles are easy to figure out; it made me and my kids laugh a lot. And it has a very sincere story line that is cute, and pretty intriguing the first time through.

I'm not sure what's wrong with this game - it has nice graphics, quite interesting plot with some twists and suspense, gameplay creatively splitted into two different characters, nice sense of humour. It looks great, doesn't it? But it just goes wrong from the very beginning - starting from Shay first scenes (showing us how bored he is and accidentaly making us bored too) to the grande finale (which need to be repeated many times, until we find out the correlations and learn to avoid all mistakes).

As a backer of this game, I played the Act 1 as soon as it was released for the backers, but only an year later I am writing this review. I think it is easier to review it more objectively now that I am temporally distant from my expectations and frustrations (this sounds a nice excuse for my laziness). First of all, this game has a nice background art from Nathan Stapley. The music is ok, but you (probably) will not be whistling its themes 20 years later, as I do for Day of the Tentacle or Monkey Island. Concerning the story, I found it neither interesting not funny… I was more immersed even in Machinarium, which has no conversations at all! However, the weakest aspect of the game are the "flash style" animations. In the golden days of adventures, our imagination would play a central role in creating a world underlying those pixelated graphics and animations, and it worked! For poorly animated high definition graphics, it does not work! It completely prevents my imagination from creating a world under those morphing pictures or stick-doll movements (the animations in Machinarium are a counterexample that "flash style" animations can work, if nicely done). Fortunately, it seems that we are living the well deserved fall of flash, with occasional re-visitations of the old pixelated graphics in adventures, action-adventures or even survival horror games (see Catequesis). Therefore, my final judgement is that this game is by no means a comeback to LucasArts days. If you are not already a fan of adventures, this game (probably) does not worth your money because it will (probably) not worth your time. Go for the classics and try to use your imagination on those big pixels.