Maybe I‘m too thick or perhaps we just don’t click like we used to? Either way, some puzzles in Broken Age were tough as nails.
It’s a thoughtful and imaginative game but in equal measure, a chore wrought in guess work, cluttered with poorly realised puzzles whose inventiveness seems hazardous to their own brilliance.
A staple of gaming in the late 80s and a decent chunk of the 90s,Maybe I‘m too thick or perhaps we just don’t click like we used to? Either way, some puzzles in Broken Age were tough as nails.
It’s a thoughtful and imaginative game but in equal measure, a chore wrought in guess work, cluttered with poorly realised puzzles whose inventiveness seems hazardous to their own brilliance.
A staple of gaming in the late 80s and a decent chunk of the 90s, point-and-click adventures have always existed on one solid foundation: player satisfaction. Pioneers Lucas Arts and Sierra both nailed this mechanic and the smug realization when you stopped and exited the Tunnel of Love in Sam & Max Hit the Road or the gratifying way Space Quest IV lectured you for cursing (“what would your mother think”?) are no accident, but perfect examples of impetus driven almost entirely by ‘the eureka moment’. It’s these mini epiphanies that make all that pointing and clicking worthwhile, as ‘the point’, as far as the player can tell, is to be rewarded for their troubles.
It’s a pity then when the re-birth of the genre, helmed by one its most beloved figureheads, fails not only to re-capture former glory but quite radically regress it – eliminating the logic and signposting (subtle in-game hints helping guide the player to a defined conclusion) that had helped give the point-and-click such a unique and intellectual essence.
This lack of logic can be found all throughout Broken Age’s 4-6 hour lifespan but is most damning in the latter half of the game, when things really start to hit the fan. Cat-hair moustache bad? I won’t tar it with that brush but it’s well on its way.
At this point in the story the player is asked to craft a makeshift hole-patch material from combination disgusting man-made broth and eggshell. Sure it sounds great but the path to the solution is far from rewarding.
The goal here is to afford the slop a pH level of 9 so it can be used to patch up a spaceship. Figuring you have to plumb the depths of the purple-grey mess with your talking spoon (it makes a certain amount of sense in context), you’re told the pH is 7. A basic chat with your dad, the mastermind behind this plan, has you learn the acidic materials will lower the pH, whilst dropping in anything highly alkaline (say, a shell) will raise it. Alright – I’ll just drop in this shell I got earlier. “Just a minute” says Shay, one the game’s two main characters, “that’s a shell-shaped instrument, not a shell”. Here’s where the real fun begins…
Depending on your capacity for arbitrary inventory mashing, the next 30 minutes to an hour of gameplay will see you traipsing backdrops, attempting to combine a fish with a snake and growing steadily more frustrated as you attempt to solve this bastard of a riddle. Through nothing more than process of elimination, the solution finally becomes clear – use the juice tapper from the guy in the tree to crack the egg of the bird that had previously attacked you every time you went near it, let alone when you tried to smash up its kid’s house with a blunt instrument. There’s no flow here nor reason and this laziness garnishes the whole game – the player asked to exhaust all possibilities before proceeding.
Though dotted with imagination and some genuine fun, the elaborate and seemingly random nature of Broken Age distills it to nothing more than a disappointing irony, cruel in its purpose and choice of moniker. In attempting to recapture the inventiveness of its predecessors, its ambition has tipped the balance and now has it nowt more than a frustrating exercise in developer telepathy.
Space Quest, Sam & Max or Monkey Island this game certainly isn’t, though it can now share a shelf with Assassin's Creed Unity and the Masterchief Collection as a herald of the broken Age (with apologies given to Broken Sword).… Expand
Broken AgeYour Score0 out of 10User Score
