I completed Vella’s Act I adventure in its entirety before moving over to Shay’s, for example. While you can swap between characters at will in Act I, it’s purely optional. Solutions are logical, and don’t rely on obtuse adventure-game logic I was almost always left thinking, “Oh, of course,” after finally punching in the final step of a tricky puzzle.Īct II does something that’s a bit jarring, however. By the time I finished playing, I had piles of scrap paper around me, which I consider the sign of a game well done. Two of the standouts involve unraveling a tricky knot by proxy, and a deeply involved puzzle built around robotics. Act II isn’t nearly as forgiving, but it is just as fair. The first act had its share of tricky puzzles, but I worked through most of them and lucked out through the rest. It’s a delicate balance that never wobbles too far in one direction. Instead, it’s reminiscent of hanging out with a funny friend the lighthearted tone and surface whimsy are present throughout, but there’s also the same sinister undertone beneath the whipped-cream coating. The laughs don’t come from desperate pop-culture references and forced slapstick. I know humor is subjective, but I think Broken Age represents the apex of Double Fine’s writing. One of the reasons Shay was eager to get off the ship was because he was so lonely, and Vella doesn’t have much of a chance to socialize, but the few characters she encounters are funny and unexpected. Vella’s time on the ship becomes more interesting as time goes on, too, but it’s her turn to feel isolated. Note: The payoff is supremely stupid and great. It made moments like revisiting the snake in the forest that much better, since I still had the agony of wondering what was behind him fresh in my mind. I took his advice, and I recommend you do the same. Game designer Tim Schafer recommends that players start from the very beginning of the game before playing through the new content – even those who have already completed Act I. Meanwhile, Shay’s experience with being duped makes him particularly well-suited to deal with Broken Age’s cast of supporting characters. Vella continues to develop as a determined and strong character in her portion of the story. The talking (and puking) tree, however, is one notable exception. Shay, too, feels the consequences of Vella’s actions – fortunately she left a positive effect on the people she met. On the ship, Vella learns more about her greater role in the world, while sorting through and repairing the damage she caused. That pile of fish guts continues to reek. Car’l has left her husband behind in Meriloft to try her hand at fishing. Some of the effects are obvious I approached Marshall Dune to say hello, but he still has the pitch pipe stuck in his throat and it’s impossible to decipher what he’s trying to say. You don’t knock a sacrifice-craving deity out of the sky without causing a few ripples after all. Now, players – and our heroes – have to sort through the consequences of those actions. The first half of Broken Age was about setting up the pieces and then knocking them over with a well-intentioned swipe of the arm. It’s not until I switched to Shay that I fully appreciated what’s going on. Doors that I could walk right through in Act I were now broken, and paths I’d walked on were blocked off. When I started guiding Vella through Shay’s ship, I had a nagging suspicion that this part of the game was going to be shorter and less ambitious than what came before. There are surprises and big revelations, to be sure, but the world remains largely familiar – and that’s one of its many strengths. People often get carried away and say that a sequel or chapter changes everything you think you knew about a world. Without revealing too much about the previous installment, this half depicts what happens after Shay and Vella switch places Vella is in the lonely spacecraft, and Shay is ejected onto Shellmound Beach. Thanks to the cliffhanger at the end of Act I, we know a lot more about them – but just as I’d grown fond of each character and figured out how their lives intersected, they were yanked apart. Shay lived an isolated and coddled existence on a spaceship, and he desperately wanted to see what was behind its toddler-toy facade. They couldn’t have been more different – Vella was a tough young woman who bucked tradition because, well, it was stupid. I spent hours playing the first half of Broken Age’s concurrent stories, wondering how they were connected. Thank goodness I wasn’t holding my breath a year after the first half was released, Broken Age’s story has come to a conclusion that is absolutely worth the wait. Broken Age’s first act ended on one heck of a cliffhanger, and left me wondering what Vella and Shay would be doing next.
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