Finished Broken Age Act 1. Decent adventure game with some likeable characters and story, plus fantastic art, voice acting and animation. But...
- The puzzle design is very simplistic; many puzzles, though highly logical in their design, were things I completed almost incidentally or even accidentally. The only time I ever got stuck was when I forgot to pick up one item I noticed earlier but got distracted by something else, then realized I needed it later. I don't mind the lack of verb items use, but the puzzle construction itself just does not leave that much to the imagination.
- I don't like how items get thrown away immediately after they're used. There's only a tiny handful of items that you ever keep for more than a single task. The problem with this is that instead of using items-as-generic-tools you learn to use in new ways throughout the whole game, they simply become keys for doors that are disposed of once no longer needed. In other words, it's like Doom's "find the red key and use it on the red door" but with a layer of obfuscation. For me, good adventure game puzzles are about how you do something, not what item you use with an object/character/etc. It reduces the puzzles almost entirely down to what's basically a guessing game with only one obvious answer.
- Tim Schafer cannot into tone. He makes a happy-go-lucky/weird fantasy world and then tries to tell a more serious story with Deep & Profound Meaning(MT) in it. It's like if you tried to turn a stranger version of Monkey Island into a touching life lesson. It does not work. Furthermore, it doesn't really hearken back to old-school adventure games enough for me to say it really follows through on the promises made during the Kickstarter campaign.
- The story is something I'm feeling very iffy about. The discovery of information is handled well but I'm not sure there is really much of a plot to it, and it seems details are intentionally left ambiguous not because the story is especially complicated or engaging, but simply to create a shallow sense of mystery.
- The world design itself makes no sense. I know it doesn't have to, but going from Baker Town, to Cloud City, to Cabin the Woods, to Sandcastle Land, to Ancient Cult Temple, and having little to no real sense of space between those locations, is very jarring. Adventure games often do a good job at world-building but Broken Age's just feels like a bunch of random ideas tossed together with no real clear link from one to the next.
Overall it's kind of better than I expected, and I can say I
did enjoy it for what it was, but it also wasn't exactly fantastic. I'm interested to see where it goes in Act 2 (if Double Fine can even hang on long enough to deliver
that), but left feeling fairly underwhelmed considering there are plenty more great adventure games out there today being made on similar or smaller budgets.
