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Review: Broken Age: Act 1

Two years ago, developer Double Fine started what would become an historic Kickstarter campaign to fund a new point-and-click adventure game in the vein of Monkey Island and Day of the Tentacle. Two years later, after a public and bumpy journey, we have the first act of that new adventure: Broken Age.

Broken Age: Act 1 tells the story of two characters, starting in two distinctly different environments. Vella is a girl from the village of Sugar Bunting, a town that is beset every dozen years by a great beast called Mog Chothra that can only be repelled by human sacrifices. Shay, on the other hand, is a boy who has grown up on a daycare-like spaceship overseen by his ‘Mom’, a coddling AI who still treats him like a baby. Both characters seek to break from their situation and forge their own paths; Vella by destroying Mog Chothra and ending the Maiden’s Feast forever, and Shay by escaping the ship in search of adventure.

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Gameplay is reminiscent of the traditional adventure game style, but with a few modernised tweaks. Controls have been somewhat simplified, with a context-sensitive cursor that automatically shifts between movement, talking prompts and interaction as necessary. The traditional inventory is kept, of course, and offers the ability to try and use every thing on everything. In a fun touch, there is specific spoken dialogue for quite a lot of these ‘wrong’ combinations, making a mistake feel less like a failure and more like a fun pit stop on the way.

On that note, the voice acting is top-notch. There are many famous names among the cast – including Elijah Wood as protagonist Shay, Jack Black as a suspect religious leader and Jennifer Hale as the ‘Mom’ AI – and while these do give you those “I-know-that-voice” moments, it doesn’t detract from the rest of the cast. All the performances throughout the game are textured and emotive, giving the game that extra layer of polish.

Visually, the game is presented in a painterly style based on the art of Nathan ‘Bagel’ Stapley, a regular collaborator with Double Fine. Whilst I do enjoy Bagel’s art style, early on in the game’s development I felt it looked overly simple with its often stick-figure-esque characters, and that it wouldn’t really feel RIGHT for a video game. Thankfully I was proven wrong, as the character models are emotive and varied throughout the game’s different zones, while still retaining an overall sense of cohesion. Watching the characters move and talk serves to demonstrate just how many unique drawings were created for the game, and they are animated in a way that feels fluid – more like an animated cartoon than anything else.

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There’s very little wrong with the game to point out, in all honesty – I did experience a few graphical issues, though this could be attributed to it being the early-release Kickstarter backer version of the game. There have been at least two small patches since then, so assumably these little kinks have been ironed out in the lead-up to the public release. Beyond that, I did find that this first act of the game occasionally felt a bit too easy. I’m no savant when it comes to adventure games – I’ll happily admit to being stumped multiple times throughout the Monkey Island series – but here in Broken Age I found I was rarely challenged for more than a few moments. Double Fine have stated that their intent was to make Act 1 slightly easier than Act 2 so as to act like a ramping difficulty curve, but I still felt it could have been pushed a BIT further. Frustrating as they can be, the mental gymnastics required from older adventure games leave you feeling a great sense of accomplishment when you do figure things out.

Because it is part one of two, Broken Age: Act 1 ends on something of a cliffhanger. There’s still a sense of resolution for both characters, but the game definitely ends with more questions than answers. A smart move on the part of Double Fine, it’s definitely a pull to wait out the game’s conclusion arriving later in the year.

 

8.5 out of 10

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About the author

Matt Gosper

aka Ponk – a Melburnian gay gamer who works with snail mail. Enthusiastically keeping a finger in every pie of the games industry. I'll beat you at Mario Kart, and lose to you in any shooter you can name.