Following a rather painful 16-month delay following one of the biggest narrative reveals in recent gaming history, the second act of Double Fine’s point-and-click adventure Broken Age is upon us. Have Double Fine been able to leap over the crazy high bar they set for themselves with the first installment?
When last we saw our heroes Vella and Shay, their storylines – individual and apparently unconnected – finally wove together. Shay, raised in solitude on a spaceship built to entertain a toddler, had finally broken free of the interminable daily routines the ship had presented to him and found the world as he saw it was rather different than what he’d been led to believe.
At the same time, Vella, groomed throughout her youth to be made a sacrifice to Mog Chothra, the monster her people worship, eschewed her societal role and seized her destiny with both hands, and in doing so pulling the veil off a colossal lie that wrapped both her life and Shay’s up in its tendrils.
Act 2 kicks off exactly where Act 1 left of. For those who’ve never actually played the first Act then you may not actually notice when the second begins. Act 2 comes as a free update to the base game and it doesn’t so much announce itself as it does simply roll out of bed and carry on.
With our two leads finally united the game wastes no time in separating them again, sending Shay into Vella’s world and Vella onto Shay’s ship. This is a story that is built around the concept of symmetry and it help us to discover things about our heroes in ways that are far more natural than wading through simple expository dialogue. And while this focus on symmetry may work extremely well when applied to the narrative, it struggles a bit when applied to the gameplay. You could be forgiven for thinking that Broken Age might decide to go somewhere different or introduce us to new people at this point but instead it chooses to retrace its steps, sticking to the same locations we’ve already seen, though altered by the course of the story. You trundle around the same rooms on the ship that Shay already turned upside down and you re-inspect every single part of the world that you did as Vella almost a year and a half ago. The best you get in terms of newness are three new rooms toward the end of the game. Similarly, there’s only a handful of new characters to interact with and the vast majority of people you run up against are ones you met in Act 1.
And the weird thing is that in literally any other game of this kind, this apparent stagnation would be infuriating. Given the length of time dedicated to creating Act 2, it’s hard not to wonder what the hell Double Fine were doing that took so long. Act 2 is pretty hard to stay mad at it because Double Fine’s winning combination of gorgeous, characterful visuals and extremely subversive sense of humour are still so damned entertaining but the familiarity of it all does kill the pace pretty conclusively. Act 2 just doesn’t feel like it can quite recapture the spirit of adventure that Act 1 had in spades.
What Act 2 does work hard to remedy from the previous installment its the Act 1’s early game puzzles that were so easy you were basically shrugging them off. It definitely didn’t recall Tim Schaefer at the height of his powers, crafting truly bizarre leaps of logic in order to pass through an area. Act 2 has a far greater variety of puzzles on offer than Act 1 – so many, in fact, that the focus on conversation and plot from the first half is placed firmly to one side – and they have a far greater range of difficulty than before. There were a couple that I needed to break out my notebook to properly nut out. There are logic puzzles, inventory puzzles and more, all of which will make you feel like you’re playing a Schaefer classic.
There’s a couple that felt a bit unfair or unnecessarily convoluted. I was thwarted by the cursor on a few occasions – a few times it got me confused between the puzzle I was actually trying to focus on and items and objects in the background that didn’t help me at all. Similarly I ran into a few instances where the game’s extended delay caused it to falter. One especially dramatic moment towards the end of the game asked me to remember what happened to a character I hadn’t run into since Act 1 and I honestly struggled to remember.
The game’s finale also fell a little short, despite how incredibly well-written and smartly put together it was. Villains, how are introduced in the very late stages, are a bit lazy and not very well drawn at all. Their inclusion actually forces what has, up to this point, been a very unconventional story into a rather conventional climax that does its two very interesting characters a major disservice.
Broken Age is known for being smart portrait of youthful longing, the abrasiveness of the idealism of adolescence and the kind of cynicism that only comes with age and experience and a subversive attack on ingrained gender roles, but in the end none of that really goes anywhere. The early part of the game that was largely propelled by a beating heart and razor tongue is cast off as the game charges headlong into a more action packed ending than I think many will be expecting.
Shortcomings aside, Schaefer still has a wonderful turn of phrase and an ability to create memorable, weird characters. He can still craft bizarre puzzles with the best of them. the problem in a nutshell is that the game’s determination to make you retread familiar ground clashes so glaringly with its characters fervent desire to free themselves from routine.
Review Score: 6.0 out of 10
Highlights: Excruciatingly funny; smart puzzle design; likeable characters
Lowlights: Feels like a retread of Act 1; Flat ending
Developer: Double Fine Productions
Publisher: Double Fine Productions
Released: April 29, 2015
Platform: PC, Mobile
Reviewed on PC
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