Broken Age is a family-friendly, hand-animated, puzzle-filled adventure game with an all-star cast including Elijah Wood, Jack Black and Masasa Moyo.
Crowdfunding and Broken Age
Funded by a record-breaking crowdfunding campaign and designed by industry legend Tim Schafer, Broken Age is a timeless coming-of-age tale of puking trees and talking spoons. Vella Tartine and Shay Volta are two teenagers in oddly similar situations but vastly different worlds. You can freely switch between his stories.
The Broken Age adventure
Act 1 of Broken Age is a beautiful, immaculately written adventure that also conveys nostalgia. It also heralds a new era for the point-and-click genre. Any fears that Double Fine's groundbreaking Kickstarter would disappoint are allayed when you enter director Tim Schafer's beautiful fever dream. It takes the classic shape created in games like Monkey Island and Day of the Tentacle and modernizes it with sleek design and beautiful aesthetics.
Between cheerfulness and hardness
What's even more impressive is that Broken Age's tone expertly oscillates between moments of pure hilarity and brutal poignancy while telling a story whose first half is instantly among the best in video gaming. The dual adventures of Shay, a lonely cosmonaut who may be the last living human, and Vella, a young woman who rejects her fate as a sacrificial lamb to the Cthulhu-like beast Mog Chothra, are both handled with elegance.
jokes and innuendos
The script is packed with jokes and innuendo found on many different levels - like a Pixar film or an episode of Adventure Time, it treats comedy with a nuance rarely seen in games. Tim Schafer's adventure game is full of humor. The game explores strong themes of loneliness, sacrifice and what it means to truly grow up.
Shay and Vella
Although Shay and Vella live in very different worlds. They put up tough fights. Both face their destiny and try to escape the figurative and sometimes literal shackles of their lives. The narrative of the story is powerful in this. The story of the four-hour adventure will make you laugh or burst into tears at several points.
The puzzles
The fantastic writing style continues in Broken Age's great puzzle design. The logic here is spot on, as Double Fine's strange machinations within the confines of the world all make wonderful sense. Combining items, navigating dialogue trees, and exploring the world all contain the same kind of joy that made Schafer famous in the '90s. Broken Age proves that adventure games don't have to reinvent their gameplay to be great - great writing, characters and world design are the three pillars to creating a classic, and Double Fine has these in abundance.
The character system
Broken Age's dual-character system also comes in handy when you're stuck on a puzzle. From Valla you can immediately jump to Shay's Adventure. Unfortunately, in Act 1, the characters never really interact with each other. But as great as the writing and puzzle design is in Broken Age, it's the artwork that immediately stands out as a defining feature. Broken Age is graphically very nice. The world feels like a picture book brought to life. The coloring and animation in particular lend an almost tactile feel, and the relative simplicity of the character design helps ensure each citizen has a memorable experience.
The characters
From Curtis, the lumberjack with an understandable fear of trees, to Harm'ny Lightbeard, the Jack Black-voiced guru who may or may not be a snake oil salesman, Broken Age's cast never fails to excite. These characters populate a creative hodgepodge of locations and hopping between floating cities on the clouds to lonely spaceships that double as children's playgrounds. The sheer variety makes you eagerly await every new scene change.
Interactions
Interacting with the world is great thanks to a minimal use of menus that never spoils the on-screen visuals. You click and drag elements to use them on different objects in the environment. Unfortunately, Broken Age doesn't have an easy way to just scroll through the items in your inventory. That can sometimes be frustrating. You have to constantly pop in and out of the item bar.
The mobile version
The mobile version of Broken Age Act I features the same fantastic art, puzzles, and humor as its PC counterpart. The iPad version is designed intuitively on the touchscreen. Navigating the environment, observing scattered items and solving puzzles with your fingertips brings even more intimacy to an already amazing experience.
Conclusion
Verdict Broken Age Act 1 is an absolute joy of an adventure. It's packed with unforgettable characters, incredible puzzles, and one of the most beautiful worlds you'll find in games. It culminates in an effective cliffhanger. Broken Age relies on the strengths of the genre: storytelling and world building.
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