A video game review of Double Fine’s newest game, Broken Age
From talking trees to galactic yarn-weaving machines, Broken Age may be one of the quirkiest, exuberating adventure games writer, Tim Schafer has ever created.
Schafer — who’s known for his classic point-and-click adventures like Grim Fandango and Day of Tentacle during the late 90s with LucasArts — returned to his roots with Broken Age, a point-and-click, coming-of-age story that follows two teens who venture to find their purpose in their respected universe.
What Broken Age does so well in it’s two-part act, is that it combines a rare concoction of nuance and teenage angst along with witty humor that’s subtle, yet relatable.
Notoriously known for its development cycle, Broken Age has finally reached gamer’s computers after about a year’s wait, and with it comes an experience that’s hard to match.
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Story
Broken Age follows two teens, Vella Tartine and Shay Volta, as they try to make amends with the status quo of their respective societies.
Shay, voiced by actor Elijah Wood, is part of a space project called “Operation Dandelion” on an intergalactic vessel alongside his overbearing mother and his easy going, but also kinda forgettable dad as he is blanketed by childless “missions” and an infantile schedule. Stuck in monotony and boredom, Shay eventually slips his way into the ship’s core to find the mysterious “Marek," a man wearing a wolf disguise who seeks to sabotage the ship.
Vella is more progressive and bold between the two protagonists, and prepares for the “Maiden's Feast," which is a ritual performed once a year in every village of the “Badlands." During each Maiden's Feast that the villages have, a few select women are sacrificed to the deified “Mag Chothra” — giant creatures that travel over the “Plague Dam” to abduct the sacrificial maidens.
Without spoiling anything, Broken Age’s story and writing is wonky, but in a bizarre, brilliant way. I adored both protagonists by the end of Act II, and Schafer does an adequate job of holding the player’s attention throughout, even if the plot falls a little flat in Act II.
In Act I, I felt deeply tied to the emotional connection between Shay and Vella, as both characters display emotions I faced as a teen: handling disappointment, finding one’s identity, having ambition to grow past social confinements. In Act II, however, those themes portrayed in Act I take a backseat, and in return, the plot becomes jumbled with genetics and mutations. Frustrated by this, I had to remember something after the credits rolled: this is Tim Schafer. Players shouldn’t purchase Broken Age because it’s supposed to be analytically annotated. They should buy it because it brings a beautiful universe to life. And it does just that in both acts.
Along the 12-hour adventure, I met dynamic characters like F’ther and Marek, that other developers could only dream about incorporating. More importantly though, Broken Age took me out of my element. For the amount of time I had my eyes glued to the computer screen, I was encapsulated by the vivid, perplexing world in front of me. I can’t say many games have made me feel that way over the past 14 years of gaming.
Gameplay and Graphics
Broken Age returns to the classic roots of point-and-click adventures found in the 1990s and along with it are the mind-numbing puzzles.
Shay’s are more of your typical item based puzzles seen in previous point-and-click games while Vella’s are a mashup of timed puzzles, which are trial and error. By Act II, Broken Age’s puzzle system becomes more parallel, as players switch back and forth from Shay and Vella to solve a certain puzzle. For an example, one puzzle had Vella and Shay string wires to robot hexipads that help solve a certain puzzle late in the game. The trick was, however, that each hexipad’s correct wiring schematic had to be found in the other protagonists’ world. This parallelism, while refreshing, can be quite infuriating toward the end of the game. One puzzle in particular, almost made me restart my whole game because I forgot a certain clue given to me in the first act.
It was also disappointing to see a lack of new environments to explore in the second half of the game. Even though each area Shay and Vella explore has it’s own flair, it probably wouldn’t have hurt to add a new setting here and there.
Final Verdict
Between the 12-hours of hair-pulling puzzles, slick humor and unforgettable characters, Schafer has created a game that could easily stand the test of time. The wait is worth it.
Score: 4/5
@Lukeoroark
