
It’s designed to allow you to figure out how everything works after a few minutes of fiddling.Īs is so often the case with these types of games, the puzzles are solved using a mix of grounded, rational puzzle-solving, and frantic “maybe this goes here?!” experimentation. You can move, you can look at and interact with things, and you can click-drag items out of the pop-up inventory menu to use them in the world. There’s no tutorial to speak of, but failure isn’t really built into Broken Age‘s systems.
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Veterans of Maniac Mansion, Full Throttle, The Secret of Monkey Island, and their ilk should be able to jump right in with the entirely contextual cursor.

The actual gameplay is traditional point-and-click adventuring. By the time you find yourself dangling from a metaphorical cliff in the final moments of Act I, the cleverness of this dual-story approach becomes clear. Scattered through each of the stories are little hints and nods that seem to reference the other, but the two plots are inextricably tied to one another.

Whether you play one all the way through and then the other, or switch back and forth with each new scene, there’s a strong script to support your decision. What’s more, the revelations in each story are additive. You choose one or the other when you first fire up the game, but switching is as easy as bringing up the inventory menu and clicking the character portrait in the bottom right corner of your screen.
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Players are free to explore the Vella and Shay stories with no restriction. Furthermore, he has absolutely no idea why he’s stuck here, beyond a computerized “Mom” AI telling him that he’s important. Shay may be safe, but he’s bored and unhappy. What seems like a dangerous scenario turns out to be an excuse to eat ice cream, or weather an ambush by nauseatingly cute hug monsters. His ship is designed to keep him safe, and the “missions” he’s sent on are fluff. It sounds great and noble, and maybe even a little bit dangerous, but it quickly becomes clear that Shay’s freedom is an illusion. On the other side there’s Shay, the captain and lone human resident of a spaceship that’s charged with righting wrongs throughout the cosmos. Vella is to be presented to Mog Chothra in the Feast that’s about to kick off when the story opens, but it turns out that she’s not so keen on the idea of being eaten by a gigantic monster. These “Maiden’s Feast” celebrations, as they are known, are revered by the celebrating communities, which offer up their most fetching women to placate the beast. Vella’s seemingly idyllic world is host to mass murder event every handful of years when the mysterious beast Mog Chothra appears from points unknown to accept human sacrifices from each town. On one side there’s Vella, a young woman born with a death sentence.

There’s a connection between them, but that’s not important right now.īroken Age: Act I … only exists because it bucked the system. Two characters, two storylines, two journeys focused on breaking free of established norms and finding a Better Way. The story you don’t know, the one in the freshly released Broken Age that you’re ostensibly reading this review to get a sense of, is also about people trying to buck the oppressive system that they’re stuck in. That’s the story you know, the one that the games press has been squawking about since March 2012. The enthusiasm was enough to encourage Tim Schafer and his team at Double Fine Productions to go big, so big, in fact, that Broken Age had to be split in two, with Act I out now and Act II to follow later this year.

From the moment it turned a $400,000 crowdfunding target into more than $3.3 million pledged by excited fans, it represented a disruption of everything we’ve come to know about video game publishing. Fitbit Versa 3īroken Age: Act I – the game once breathlessly referred to as “Kickstarter sensation Double Fine Adventure!” – only exists because it bucked the system.
