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 itBroken 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.… Expand
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