Decline Broken Age - Double Fine's Kickstarter Adventure Game

The weirdest thing is that it's pretty easy to make it a better (and harder) adventure game:

1: One button for looking and one for using. (FUCKING TABLETS)
2: Less hints in dialogue and no items given through dialogue.

 

3: Fake success: you solve a puzzle but then again, not.

I'll give 2 Monkey Island 2 examples: The oar you use to climb up a tree. it breaks, then you have to fix it. Or the map that is in elaine's mansion: when you get it, the dog sniffs it. when on the frontyard, wind blows it to a cliff. When you think you finally get it with a fishing pole, a seagull brings it to the top of that tree from the first example. Monkey 2 also had an easy mode that eliminates all these fail attempts.

 

felipepepe
More like you feel like an Ubermenschen amirite?

 

Minor spoilers ahead:

I think the logic of the planet is tied into the entertainment zones for Shay. I think the places on the planet have been "rewritten" to essentially be a theme park for him. That's why Steel Bunting became Sugar Bunting and the whole thing seems so theme parkish. So it might actually be clever in the end.

 

Alright. So I've finished Broken Age, act 1. I have to say, individually speaking, all of Codex's criticisms I agree with, but the combined condemnation I find myself puzzled at.

First of all, the length. It took me about 4-5 hours, so I suppose it will be a 8-10 hour game in total. That's short, yes, but I'm not too unhappy with it given the $15 Kickstarter tag. The official price of $25 I feel is a bit much. I also tend to think adventure games don't benefit from larger scope/length like RPGs do, as the gameplay is more limited (puzzles, puzzles, puzzles). In terms of whether the length feels right for this game in particular, indeed it should have been larger - keep the same locations, just add more things to do in each area. But I don't think it's criminally short.

Second of all, the puzzles. There's no getting away from the fact that this is BA's biggest flaw and that it can only be the outcome, reasonably, of two possible factors: (1) a screwed up production process or incompetence; (2) a desire to casualise. Either way, the end result is something that directly contravenes the old school promise. My attitude to all the KS I backed is 'just make a good game, I'm not too hung up on it otherwise', but it is pretty blatant here. The opening scenes for girl and boy are both terrible one-click affairs; at the maiden's feast basically there's not much of a logic to figure things out beforehand, so you try every item on every girl until you get the right one. The boy one is just click X, click Y, click Z. There are some equally bland puzzles later on - the worst culprit is surely SOLVE THE RIDDLE OF YORN, and by then you've learned to just drag and drop every single item in your inventory on them, and lo and behold, you simply give them the fruit you had before. There's a golden opportunity for a complex multi-step puzzle and you basically solve it if you didn't miss the gigantic fruit tree before. I'm an adventure game noob and I don't exactly miss the difficulty in some of the older games, but it's a bit too gormless here.

But I think the good / not-so-bad parts of the game are also considerable:

The art style and graphics I think are actually good. Sure, I prefer Grim Fandango, GK1/2, TLJ, Sanitarium... they had excellent direction. But while the visuals of Monkey Island, King's Quest or Full Throttle are nice, I don't think they're so superior like the first list, and Broken Age, depending on your tastes, can hold its own with them. The pity is that I think it is best with more stylised scenes, like the forest outdoors of the lumberjack's house, instead of the cartoonish cloud land, but the latter are more abundant. The sheer variety of animations has already been mentioned, and even if I wish they didnt' splurge on that so much, it's there and it's nice.

The writing and plot I think is decent, too. In the first hour I was thinking what is this saturday breakfast cartoon bullshit. The problem is related to scope in that if this is a 30 hour game, then that's OK for the beginning, but if it's a 8-10 hour game, far too much % of it is spent in Cartoon Network. There are some little funny moments, but generally the boy path in Act 1 doesn't really get out of that; the biggest disappointment here is the wolf character, who, so far, is the worst character in the entire game, in terms of how much tprominence he has yet how thoroughly uninteresting and unfunny he is. In a setting so devoid of 'actual' characters they really needed him to be a lot better, or have a larger supporting cast - e.g. the 'dad' of the machine disappears after the first 10 minutes. However, I think the girl's path gets better as it keeps going. Cloud land is bit heavy-handed in the guru satire but there's a healthy variety of characters and their approaches to that; the lumberjack guy is well done, and Shellmound is OK too. The 'twist' is pretty obviously foregrounded, but I don't mind, and it does set things up for an interesting second act, which is guaranteed to be less saccharine.

(There are some odd disjunctures in the delivery of the story; too often you're not sure why you're doing what, i.e. you don't know why you need the tree's sap when you ask it for it; why exactly you want to get to the forest below cloud land is sometimes a bit obscure; etc., etc. I think tuluse's hunch is right though, and the Steel Bunting / Sugar Bunting stuff I think is the one genuinely clever moment. I'm hoping the story will step up in Act 2.)

Basically, I feel like if only it had some more puzzles, proper ones at that, then it could be called a very good adventure game. It isn't particularly old school, but I think it has character, and I'm glad it's here. I just wish they cut some of the animations and spent some time thinking of puzzles beyond "hey, we need to cut something, let's give them a knife" level.

 

Exactly. Something tired becoming enjoyable once more doesn't actually make any sense to me. First of all I wasn't tired of that "model". That was the fucking point of the Kickstarter, was it not? To bring back that model of play.
Of course, as others have noted, most backers probably didn't actually want that as much as they wanted a funny slideshow directed by Schafer.

 

An adventure game without puzzles is like an FPS without shooting, e.g., Dear Esther. Not surprising we get another 2deep4u e-storybook.

 

I'm playing Indy and the Fate of Atlantis(maiden experience) right now and the puzzles in this game seem pretty simple but cool.(I'm at the U-boat right now..) My question is, how easy is broken age compared to this game?

 

Significantly easier. Not even really comparable.

 

I thought it was very boring and pointless, story never seemed to go anywhere and it didn't really make much sense.

I really think Monkey Island 1 and 2 were great in spite of Schafer, everything that guy has made in the past decade has disappointed me.

 

Everything he has done is at least decent, but mostly good.

 

Maybe it's because I played it 20 years ago but I remember it being fairly challenging. It also had three different 'modes' -- teaming up with the woman, wits, and fists; giving it a lot of replay value.

I know you're afraid to get your review copies cut off but this simply isn't true.

 

Psychonauts is still good, though.

 

It's not bad but it's grossly overrated. It's basically something like Crash Bandicoot.

 

In context of DF's latter offerings it's Super Mario Bros.

 

Well duh, MI1-2 were mostly Gilbert's babies. That said I don't agree that Schafer was talentless back then, as clearly demonstrated with DOTT and to a very slightly lesser extent with FT. And although I don't hold GF in anywhere near as high regards as most, it was a good game despite an abominable UI. The guy clearly had talent, and he knows exactly which of his games were the best, as he demonstrated by using that DOTT screenshot in the Kickstarter to convince people that he was making an old-school adventure, even though he in fact was not.

 

That's really the entire situation in a nutshell though isn't it? We backed an old school adventure game and what we got was very much a new school adventure game (suffering from dumbing down/console/Ipaditis).

However where is the outrage apart from a small number of hardcore adventure fans like yourself? The majority of backers and buyers seem to be loving it.

Backers must have been running on nostalgia fumes, or just a massive love for Double Fine in general, going off the lack of negative feedback on this issue. They seem to be happy with this final product, personally I think it's not a terrible game, but I wouldn't have backed this, it doesn't scratch the same itch as Grim Fandango. It's too dumbed down, I could've just watched a lets play and saved some cash.

With the majority of backers and buyers loving the game for what it is and seemingly not caring for old school adventure games, the only reaction you're going to be getting is massive butt hurt because you're right and to them it doesn't matter and you should just shut up and fuck off.

Lesson learned though, it's not likely either of us will trust Double Fine with our cash again anytime soon.

 

The reception isn't that perfect, most people agree that the game is too damn easy (even on the DF forums the polls show that), and some also agree that it isn't a old-school game. But since most people gave like $15 to them and got a decent "modern" adventure game from it, they are satisfied enough.

We saw that many times before, from Skyrim to Mass Effect... people are lied to, they know they have been lied, but they are ok with the result, so they won't even bother. And the developers know that.

DF got money from old-school fans and curious people that came for the hype. Then they made a game for the widest audience possible, without caring for the old-school fans. Even if half of those fans get angry and never back then again, DF is still winning. Seriously, they had 87k backers, and I don't doubt that a week after launch they already sold at least 500k copies, perhaps even 1M, with all that hype and high scores reviews. The original 87k don't mean a fuck after that.

 

It's just sad.

 

Psychonauts and Brütal Legend were pretty great, Costume Quest and Stacking were good (although I don't know how much input he had on the last one, he wrote for the first three).

His earlier titles where he was project lead and writer at Lucas Arts (Grim Fandango, Full Throttle), as well as all the stuff he had co-written/designed (Monkey Island 1+2, Day of the Tentacle) were his greatest and all-time classics.

From the other Non-Kinect/Mobile games Double Fine made I thought Iron Brigade and The Cave (they've also kind of deceived people with that one, saying it is an Adventure game) were shit (but those were Ron Gilbert/Brad Muir projects) and Broken Age turned out very meeeh. Undecided/too early to tell about Spacebase-DF9, Massive Chalice looks like it will turn out shit.

Overall they've still done more good than bad, but they seem to be slipping lately.

 

watched a walkthrough on youtube, game is...bland and average. nothing special, not bad, just average.

really the proof that people don't know how to use the "artistic freedom" they get from making themselves indepedent from evul publishers. they are without talent and cater to some other retards instead.

 

Curious thing, I've see one of the reviews point out that "Publishers wouldn't touch this with a 10-foot-pole", but I really don't get why. Besides the horrible money management, this could be a publisher-funded game in absolutely every way.

After The Walking Dead, I'm sure it isn't hard to convince people that doing a puzzle-lite story driven game for casuals is a gold mine.

 

People don't give a shit. Those interested in 'old school' adventure games make up an extremely niche market. Developers stand to make far more money with these interactive storybooks as all the 'casual gamers' flock to them.