Broken Age is Charming, but Falls a Little Short

Broken Age is Charming, but Falls a Little Short - Samantha Lienhard

I enjoyed Broken Age. Let me get that out of the way in case my later complaints give the wrong impression. Broken Age is a point-and-click adventure game from Double Fine, the developer behind such amazing creations as Psychonauts. I like both adventure games and Double Fine’s humor, so even though I didn’t participate in the Kickstarter (and consequently never took much note of the delays or anything), I was quite interested in Broken Age.

Due to financial woes, the game was split into two parts. Act 1 was released last January (January 2014), which is when I first played it. It was short, only 3-4 hours long, but I really enjoyed it. Broken Age: Act 1 had simple puzzles but a strong sense of humor.

Its story was where it excelled. Players could swap between two different characters whose stories seemed to have no connection: a headstrong girl named Vella who doesn’t think it’s such an “honor” to be sacrificed to a monster and decides to fight the system her society is based around, and a boy named Shay who is tired of his monotonous, danger-free life aboard a spaceship. Exploring the worlds of these two very different characters and trying to figure out how their stories intersected was fantastic, and Act 1 ended with a brilliant twist and cliffhanger.

We had to wait until this April to finally see the rest of the game, but Broken Age: Act 2 didn’t satisfy me as much as I’d hoped.

Go on, what does the knot look like?

Mechanically, it may be the better of the two. It’s longer, its puzzles are trickier, and some parts require you to swap between characters in a way that makes no sense from a narrative perspective but is clever from a game perspective. I got stuck on puzzles a few times, but usually it was just because I missed something I could interact with.

Then there was the knot puzzle. That was just mean.

Some players criticize Act 2 for its trickier puzzles, but I don’t think it’s a gameplay flaw. Some parts may have been a little tedious, but overall they felt in line for an adventure game. The story, however, disappointed me a little.

Maybe it’s because of how good Act 1’s twist was, but the revelations and conclusions in Act 2 fell short of my expectations. Even though the story remained interesting, the explanation of what’s going on didn’t live up to the first half. Some oddities are handwaved, while others just raise too many questions.

Click for spoilersThe behavior of Shay’s “Mom” made sense for a computer programmed to protect him. For an actual human who really is his mother, though… ehhh…

And if you pay attention to Shay’s dialogue in the first act and his shock at seeing his father in the second act, he really believed they were computers. Great parenting, there.

Some fans think that in the long gap between the release of Act 1 and Act 2, the story was changed. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but that would go a long way toward explaining the discrepancies. Either that, or it was a PLvPW-style incident of writing a wild story without guarding against plot holes.

Do I recommend Broken Age? Yes… just be aware that the second half of the story doesn’t deliver on the potential promised by the first half.

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