Broken Age part 1 review: an adventure inside a painting

Well, the record-breaking Kickstarter phenomenon is finally here. Or at least half here. Broken Age, the Double Fine adventure game, had to be split in half for funding reasons, but the first half is going public on January 28th, and there are lot of questions it has to answer. Can it live up to the hopes of its nearly 90,000 Kickstarter backers? Can it resurrect interest in the ancient (by gamer standards) point-and-click adventure genre?

(Would you rather watch a quick review than read this in-depth one? Check out our video review of Broken Age).

Gameplay: point, and then maybe click

In terms of gameplay, Broken Age is exactly what you’d expect: a point-and-click adventure game. You click around on the screen to move your character, view and acquire/use different items, and speak with a variety of NPCs. The challenge, as in all such games, is to figure out which item needs to be given to who, which questions need to be asked in which order, and which seemingly-innocuous things you heard other characters say were actually clues. It’s basically a series of puzzles you solve in succession to pull you along through the storyline.

In the game, you control one of two characters. Shay is a frustrated teen who lives alone on a spaceship with overbearing, parental AI to stop him from getting into any sort of trouble. Vella is a young girl who has been selected to be a sacrifice to a murderous beast to protect her village. There’s no real difference in the way the two characters are played; they face different challenges but you’ll go about solving them in more or less the same way.

The danger with this sort of game is that it can get extremely frustrating when you’re stumped. Broken Age solves that problem in a couple of ways. First of all, it isn’t that difficult. There may be a couple times you come across a puzzle that stumps you and decide to sleep on it, but in general you won’t have too much trouble. And if you do get frustrated, you can switch between Shay and Velle on the fly, although if you finish one of their stories too quickly you’ll be stuck with the other until you catch up.

Another issue point-and-click adventure games of the past sometimes had was that they required you to go pixel-hunting, hovering the mouse over every single inch of the screen to see which items you could interact with and which were just window dressing. Broken Age makes this difference abundantly clear; anything you can interact with changes the shape of your cursor, and the screen areas are large enough that figuring out where to click is never the challenge.

Story

Broken Age part 1 is only half a game so, fittingly, it really only tells half of a story — or half of two stories, considering that Shay and Velle walk very different paths throughout the game. At its core are pretty universal coming-of-age themes: Shay yearns to escape from under his “mother’s” wing, and Velle strives to break free of her village’s silly traditions. They’re relatable characters that are written quite well, and you’ll get where both of them are coming from and want to help them out almost immediately.