Broken Age
Review
Act 1: A throwback to a better age
by Jonathan Fortin
reviewed on PC
Return of the Click 'N' Drag
These same priorities, however, also mean that the gameplay is extremely simple. You walk around the game world, pick up objects, use them on other objects, talk to the characters you encounter, and solve puzzles by doing various combinations of the above actions. There's only ever one way to proceed, and sometimes it is rather obtuse and convoluted. Fortunately, the game guides you well—you can usually figure out what to do without too much trouble. In the grand tradition of LucasArts graphic adventures, the game encourages you to be a kleptomaniac. Winning the game means picking up every object you possibly can, even if you can't see how it could possibly help you. You can access your inventory from the lower-left hand corner, and then click and drag items from your inventory onto objects in the game world. It'd be simpler if you could just click on them without having to hold down the mouse button, but you get used to it.
A Lack of Evolution
While modern adventure games certainly owe much to the classics, they have also evolved in some very notable ways. Telltale's The Walking Dead is probably the best example of this: like the LucasArts classics, it is story-driven, features point-and-click puzzle-solving gameplay, and contains dialogue trees. However, in Telltale's game, the story changes depending on the player's choices, with split-second decisions having dire consequences on the fates of the characters. Players can also die in The Walking Dead, which could never happen in Monkey Island or Grim Fandango. Such innovations give The Walking Dead genuine tension and suspense, making it more palatable to gamers who don't generally play adventure games.
This isn't the case with Broken Age. Its story is completely linear. While you can choose how to approach dialogue sequences, saying the wrong thing will never get you killed or derail the plot—you might have to pick a certain answer to solve a puzzle, but there's no real consequence for not doing so. The game also features some sequences that are clearly meant to be suspenseful, but if you just stand there and wait to die, nothing happens...and the illusion of tension is broken. This is a game that you cannot lose. You'll never have to think long and hard about how your decisions will impact the story—just on how to solve the relatively easy puzzles.
A Gleeful Return
On the plus side, this also means that Broken Age is a much more pleasant experience. You won't regret anything you do in this game—and certainly won't regret playing it in general. While The Walking Dead makes you cry, Broken Age makes you laugh. It gleefully returns to the glory days of adventure games, to the point where it's as though the past ten years never happened.
Gamers may be surprised by how short Act 1 is. After about four hours of gameplay, it ends with a big cliffhanger, not to mention a fairly shocking plot twist. It makes the wait for Act 2 all the more frustrating. Double Fine has more than lived up to its promise of creating an old-school adventure game. While only the first half of Broken Age has been released, it is already a true joy to play—a throwback that manages to work, even as it ignores the changes its genre has undergone in the past few years. This game could have come out ten years ago, and it would have been great then, but it's great now too. That's the very definition of timeless.
9.0
fun score
Pros
Beautiful graphics, exciting story, great sense of humor, and incredible voice cast.
Cons
It's short and Act 2 isn't out yet, no real tension during suspenseful scenes.
