Broken Age - Double Fine's Kickstarter Adventure Game

[imweasel]

A shitty box for a shitty game. Way to go, Tim.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

That's a candidate for Worst Box Art.

Of all time.

 

[Jaesun]

No, I have certainly seen worse.

 

[Jackalope]

It's pretty bad. Compared to the actual art in the actual game, it's actually kinda sad and lazy.

 

[BlackGoat]

That's the box for the documentary, you guys.

 

[taxalot]

And as it has been said many times now, the documentary is much better than the actual game.

 

[J_C]

And as it has been said many times now, the documentary is much better than the actual game.

 

[Irenaeus]

The best part of this whole affair was when Tim Schafer (sp?) got up and walked on the drum set, throwing it on the floor.

 

[Irenaeus]

Here, citation needed guy:

 

[Ivan]

Could someone summarize what happens in Act 2? I didn't bother with it. Is the wolf a furry?


fuuuuuuuuuck I was 21 when that video came out. time flies

 

[iZerw]

Could someone summarize what happens in Act 2? I didn't bother with it. Is the wolf a furry?


fuuuuuuuuuck I was 21 when that video came out. time flies

He is not a wolf but an alien.

 

[MRY]

So I'm playing through this with my kids (4 and 6) at the recommendation of some posters here. Both of them have played a lot of Primordia (for obvious reasons). It's interesting to see their reactions here.

- Generally, they seem pretty excited about the game.

- Despite being pretty good at Primordia's puzzles, they're quite bad at these puzzles. I think the answer is that these are a step farther removed from real-world logic than Primordia's. Many of the puzzles require you to employ not the oft-derided "moon logic" but just basic adventure-game logic, for example, taking every item you can, using every item you can, assuming that you can harm anything without repercussions, etc. Thus, for example, hacking a mouth into the tree with the ax was obvious to me in half a second, but they couldn't possibly fathom that was a permissible choice. Same with filling the water gun with fish blood or shooting the fish blood on people. As long as you operate from, "Every scenario must be interacted with, every permissible interaction is compulsory, and progress is alway good" -- the caricaturish Big Government view, I suppose -- the game is super easy. But if you treat problems as requiring reasonable solutions, then the game becomes obtuse. Why can't you climb a tree, or use a stool, or preemptively attack the snake, etc.?

- They found the dialogue horrible and boring. I found it okay-ish, but way too long. The dialogue is very unpurposeful -- you're not talking toward a goal, you're just talking to talk and eventually check the right box. It is also not remotely dramatic. It's telling that we were able to proceed without any hitches skipping all the dialogue; it's even more telling that they have a "skip dialogue" button. In fact, everything narrative seems overdone -- lengthy cutscenes where they should be short, lengthy dialogues where they should be short.

- About 2/3 of the way through the girl's quest, the kids started complaining about the lack of a fast-travel option (as Primordia had). "Why do we have to keep walking back and forth?" Good kids.

- The puzzles do absolutely nothing to develop the girl's character, in part because they are so thin but in part because no one seems to have stopped to think about who she actually is, what she would actually do, etc. "It's just a cartoon," "it's just a game," "it's meant to be funny," etc., okay, I get it, but I watch the cartoons my kids watch and they actually seem to understand this principle. "She is plucky and always wins" isn't a character. Vela causes considerable harm to lots of people, and while those people are generally labeled in neon as Bad Non-People (e.g., because they're into girly stuff or are religious or are trees (?)), it feels kind of off. Similarly, I get that its Powerfully Liberating that she only wants to kill things (and my girls find it amusing), but was there some backstory I missed to justify that mindset. I get the "Errr, I don't want to be eaten by a monster" but that doesn't immediately lead to, "Ergo, I will become Monster Slaytrix Extraordinaire."

It's not too bad a game so far, but I'm pretty disappointed. Seems like most of the energy went toward telling a story that doesn't quite work for me.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Well it's a trademark Lucas Arts puzzle design, isn't it? The most obvious, logical solution never works. Tim even explains this in the documentary if I remember correctly, that's just how how he rolls. The problem is, that approach is impenetrable for people who aren't already conditioned into ignoring every obvious solution and looking for weirdass ones instead. And it doesn't matter whether you 6 or 26, judging by many reviewers who complained the game is too hard.

 

[Irenaeus]

As mindx2 was told by Tim Schaffer himself, you are playing it wrong.

 

[felipepepe]

The other day my friend (who only plays console games) asked about classic old PC games and I suggested Day of the Tentacle.

It still is one of the best games ever made, but man, some puzzles are simply impossible if you're trained in years of adventure gaming. Otherwise, your brain simply isn't wired to understand the demented logic of "try everything on everything if stuck"... it's a game for a different time, when you would have just that game to play for 6 months, and simply trying new things and seeing what the characters said was satisfying...

But yeah, Broken Age is a overwritten cartoon that think it's smarter than it is, disguised as an adventure game. That Tim Shaffer did this for his daughter shows a huge disconnect... the pacing is more akin to the Care Bears Tv cartoon from the 80's than to anything kids watch in the past decade. A single Adventure Time episode has more events, better dialog and more development that the entirety of Broken Age. And it respect kid's intelligence a lot more.

 

[MRY]

Well it's a trademark Lucas Arts puzzle design, isn't it? The most obvious, logical solution never works. Tim even explains this in the documentary if I remember correctly, that's just how how he rolls. The problem is, that approach is impenetrable for people who aren't already conditioned into ignoring every obvious solution and looking for weirdass ones instead. And it doesn't matter whether you 6 or 26, judging by many reviewers who complained the game is too hard.

I don't think this is quite right, but I haven't played a Lucas Arts adventure game blind in so many years that it's hard to say. My recollection is somewhat different. The two distinctions I'd draw, off the top of my head, are:

(1) In Broken Age, with some frequency effect does not follow from cause. Sometimes it does (for example, spraying fish blood on people causes sea gulls to flock to them allowing you to steal their stuff, and all of that "works" within the game's adventure logic), but sometimes it doesn't (for example, during the sequence when the monster is eating the girls at the start, you get a corset by asking to trade your corset to someone else to get an item from her, you then get that item from her for free, etc.). Things just fall into your lap in response to stimuli, but you're not undertaking an action to achieve that result. It's hard to quite articulate what I'm talking about here, but it's like if you had a Three Trials set up, and one trial is, "Go to Mount Mandragora and harvest a mandrake root" and another trial is, "Enter the Pit of Erebus and retrieve a dead man's tooth," and then when you go up Mt. Mandragora and pull on what you think is a stalk of a mandrake, it turns out to be a shock of a buried dead man's head, and you pull his head up and get the tooth, which falls out while he says, "You idiot, there are no mandrakes left in the land of the living!" You intended a constructive action, and got a reward, but the reward wasn't what you were trying to get so the game has not only failed but actually repudiated the idea that in an adventure game you should see a lock before you pick up a key.

My recollection in other LucasArts titles is that it wasn't always clear how to get what you wanted, but you were consciously working toward a goal and when you reached it, you got what you wanted (or, perhaps, the goal receded farther into the distance, but it wasn't a bait-and-switch or non sequitur).

(2) In other LA titles, my recollection is that "the obvious solution" might fail, but it failed in a way that caused the puzzle to ramify outward, and educated you as to how to prune those new branches. "Pick up map" might cause the map to blow away, but it would nevertheless advance the puzzle's logic. That's a classic babelfish puzzle design, and when done well, it can be very rewarding and funny.

That is not what seems to be going on in Broken Age. Often logical puzzle solutions don't work because the game doesn't account for them -- for example, why can't I use a ladder to reach a peach in a tree? The game doesn't even engage with the question. Instead, you're expected to shake the branch, causing the peach to fall onto another screen, where you retrieve it. (Let us pause for a moment to note that if "the ripest peach" you ever saw fell 30 feet, it would not be retrievable. An ordinary adventure game using babelfish design would have you find the peach splattered below, prompting you to cushion the nest into which it falls with feathers. You'd go up, shake the branch, and come back to find that the nest is now being occupied by a mama bird who's eating the peaches as they fall. Etc.) In other words, it's not that the game anticipates and toys with logical solutions, it just doesn't engage with them at all.

This is something that must have become obvious in testing, because it was obvious even with the tiny testing amateur team we had on Primordia. And the response was to have some custom quip for everything a tester tried. Which is pretty shitty, as things go, but at a minimum you need an answer to, "Why can't I use the ladder?" (Where we had resources, we'd make a separate solution, but that was pretty rare.)

At the same time, also unlike other LA titles, once you grasp the adventure game logic, the puzzle solutions are always instantly obvious. Someone gives you a water gun? Of course you fill it with blood, because that's the only liquid you've encountered. Of course you spray it on the women wearing perfume. Of course you steal their perfume bottle while they're distracted by gulls. There's a tree that needs a mouth and you have an ax? Of course you hack it open. Occasionally the logic isn't there (perhaps because we're skipping dialogues and cutscenes right and left), as when using a stool on the tree caused me to get sap in my inventory (the sap was easily in reach, so I'm not sure what the stool accomplished; a ladder was rejected previously), but basically everything is a snap. In Monkey Island, getting inside adventure game logic was always the first step, not the last. Of course if there's an expectorant to be had you'd use it in a spitting contest, but that is 1/3 of the puzzle.

As mindx2 was told by Tim Schaffer himself, you are playing it wrong.

Missing the context. What is Schaffer's preferred way to play?

The other day my friend (who only plays console games) asked about classic old PC games and I suggested Day of the Tentacle.

It still is one of the best games ever made, but man, some puzzles are simply impossible if you're trained in years of adventure gaming. Otherwise, your brain simply isn't wired to understand the demented logic of "try everything on everything if stuck"... it's a game for a different time, when you would have just that game to play for 6 months, and simply trying new things and seeing what the characters said was satisfying...

But yeah, Broken Age is a overwritten cartoon that think it's smarter than it is, disguised as an adventure game. That Tim Shaffer did this for his daughter shows a huge disconnect... the pacing is more akin to the Care Bears Tv cartoon from the 80's than to anything kids watch in the past decade. A single Adventure Time episode has more events, better dialog and more development that the entirety of Broken Age. And it respect kid's intelligence a lot more.

Yeah, DotT is a culminating experience, not an introductory course. You should've pointed him to Loom or QFG. Those are great entry points. Monkey Island isn't bad, either.

I don't know if the pacing is like a Care Bears cartoon -- it's been a while since I watched 80s cartoons, though I guess I do remember them being talkier. To me, the game feels an awful lot like Dragon's Lair, insofar as huge amounts of it are not really interactive, the interactions aren't really logically/causally related to the outcomes, and "it's like a cartoon" seems to be a selling point.

I am not particularly a fan of the frenetic pace of contemporary kids' entertainment. But this all just seems very long-winded and stilted. And this coming from me!

 

[J_C]

That Tim Shaffer did this for his daughter...

... is false, proven by MRY's kids, who are not trained in oldschool adventure games, and find some of the puzzle's difficult. The only thing which can be considered kid friendly is the art style.

It is funny how people are comlaining that the game is not oldschool adventure game, yet it needs oldschool adventure game logic at the same itme.

I think you can find a few illogical puzzles in every oldschool adventure game, that is how those games rolled. You can't fault BA to follow in those footsteps.

 

[MRY]

It is funny how people are comlaining that the game is not oldschool adventure game, yet it needs oldschool adventure game logic at the same itme.

Well, that logic is only a part of adventure games, and it's not entirely clear that it's a part that falls in the "pros" column. So this seems really unconvincing to me as a "gotcha." The ways in which it doesn't feel like an oldschool adventure to me are: (1) very few inventory items; (2) very few hotspots; (3) consequently, very few puzzles; (4) those puzzles are almost all "use A on B" or "say A to B," with a small number either "combine A with B and use A+B on C" or "use A on C then B on C"; (5) very few locations open to you at any given time; (6) a huge percentage of the game is spent in irrelevant dialogues rather than engaging with puzzles; and (7) very little game at all, all said and done.

To me, it feels a fair bit like Dreamfall, only shorter, or perhaps a bit like an easier WEG title with fancy graphics/audio, maybe a bit like a streamlined The Journey Down. It doesn't feel like a Tell Tale title, and definitely has its roots in classic adventure games, but if I didn't know better, I'd be stunned to learn that it was designed by an experienced designer from the golden age of adventures. It has all the shortcomings of adventure games designed by people (and I'd include myself in this) who don't really grasp how adventure games were designed, and are doing their best to cargo cult while suffering from acute amnesia of gameplay and remembering only plot beats.

I think you can find a few illogical puzzles in every oldschool adventure game, that is how those games rolled. You can't fault BA to follow in those footsteps.

Why can't you? Certainly people fault every other contemporary adventure game for its flawed puzzles, why not this one?

But to be clear, I was not trying to suggest that only some puzzles are illogical. Most puzzles are illogical from the standpoint of either internal logic or the logic of the fictional gameworld. They are "logical" only in the sense that they are predictable if you know how the game's puzzles are designed -- like the way you can predict who is under the mask in a Scooby Doo episode simply by looking for the least culpable person who is himself attacked by the ghost at some point, since that's how the show rolls.

Even the predictable puzzles, though, aren't truly logical. For example, you prevent a ladder from falling through the clouds by putting cloudshoes on its base -- but the game already told you those shoes are too loose on your feet, and your feet are larger than the ladder's base. Incidentally, that ladder can also magically grow. That's about as close to a logical puzzle as the game has ("I want to go up, so I will use a ladder. I want the ladder not to fall through the clouds, so I'll use the item that stops you from falling through the clouds."), but it's not logical insofar as the ladder is too short to reach what you want and the shoes are too big to fit on the ladder's feet. Similarly you can cause a platform to collapse by walking onto it and removing three heavy items from your inventory and putting them on the platform. This is "logical" insofar as you know you want to use those heavy items to make the platform collapse. But obviously it's not logical since having the items in your inventory vs. having them on the ground should make no difference in terms of total mass on the platform.

Anyway, there's no reason to try and persuade someone not to like a game. If you like it, mazel tov. If you haven't played it, you probably should, if only as a matter of historical interest.

 

[J_C]

but it's not logical insofar as the ladder is too short to reach what you want and the shoes are too big to fit on the ladder's feet. Similarly you can cause a platform to collapse by walking onto it and removing three heavy items from your inventory and putting them on the platform. This is "logical" insofar as you know you want to use those heavy items to make the platform collapse. But obvious

I think in adventure games it is widely accepted that your inventory is like a magical bag, where you can fit a ton of things, smaller and bigger. You can be critical about this of course, but many times characters are just pulling out paintings, statues and mechanical parts from their pockets. The ladder is portrayed like a small ladder because it looks better to pull out a small ladder which then increases in size.

But thanks for sharing your ideas about puzzle design, these principles might be useful in my little game.

 

[tuluse]

The problem isn't that the puzzles are illogical, it's that they suck.

 

[MRY]

Actual BA puzzle design:

 

[Lyric Suite]

So drugs basically.

 

[Tehdagah]

Vela causes considerable harm to lots of people, and while those people are generally labeled in neon as Bad Non-People (e.g., because they're into girly stuff or are religious or are trees (?)), it feels kind of off.

Lol what?

 

[MRY]

A major theme in the game is girls trying to look pretty and getting killed and/or sprayed with fish blood by the protagonist (causing them to be mauled by gulls). Another major theme is ignorant religious people being ignorant and suffering various indignities accordingly. Since generally the protagonist is supposed to be a Role Model who certainly would never be in favor of hurting a person, I've inferred that the victims are probably Non-Persons who we shouldn't worry about.

 

[Tehdagah]

Tim Schafer confirmed for hating girls.