The coloring and animation in particular help lend an almost tangible feeling, and the relative simplicity of the character design helps make each citizen a memorable one. As trite as it might sound, the world feels like a picture book come to life. Nothing I can say will do justice to just how gorgeous Broken Age is.
Day of the Tentacle has your three characters constantly exchanging items through time and causing ripples in one era that would affect another, and I'm hoping Act 2 (which will be delivered in a free update scheduled for later this year) brings in more puzzles of this sort.īut for as great as the writing and puzzle design in Broken Age are, it's the artwork that immediately springs forward as a defining feature. That being said, I was a little bummed that the characters never really interact throughout Act 1. Broken Age proves that adventure games don't need to reinvent their gameplay to be outstanding – great writing, characters, and world design are the three pillars of creating a classic, and Double Fine has those in spades.īroken Age’s dual-character system also proved useful whenever I hit a roadblock - getting stuck on one of Vella’s puzzles and being able to instantly hop over to Shay's adventure acts as a great mental palate cleanser. Combining items, navigating dialogue trees, and exploring the world all contain the same sort of joy that Schafer famously harnessed back in the ‘90s. The logic here is on point, as Double Fine’s strange machinations all make wonderful sense inside the confines of the world. The fantastic writing also carries over in Broken Age’s great puzzle design. It’s a testament to the script that I found myself laughing and tearing up at multiple points over the course of the four-hour adventure. Though Shay and Vella live in very different worlds, the struggles they both face as they try to escape the figurative and sometimes literal shackles of their lives provided powerful bits of storytelling.
But what I didn’t expect from Broken Age was a story that contained such powerful themes of loneliness, sacrifice, and what it means to really grow up. Continued abuse of our services will cause your IP address to be blocked indefinitely.I fully expected a Tim Schafer adventure game to be rife with humor, and Broken Age certainly delivers. Please fill out the CAPTCHA below and then click the button to indicate that you agree to these terms.
If you wish to be unblocked, you must agree that you will take immediate steps to rectify this issue. If you do not understand what is causing this behavior, please contact us here. If you promise to stop (by clicking the Agree button below), we'll unblock your connection for now, but we will immediately re-block it if we detect additional bad behavior.
Your IP address has been temporarily blocked due to a large number of HTTP requests.