Broken Age understands that it’s not the puzzles that we fondly remember from old adventure games. Those missions at the beginning of Shay’s story are the most boring and repetitive part of the game, but that’s the point. These people are already stuck in an endless, dumb, unquestioning loop, and breaking that cycle is the entire point of the game.
#BROKEN AGE ART STYLE FREE#
That’s not to say that Broken Age itself is free from such absurd, forced puzzles, but such moments are a natural extension of this world in which girls, year after year, excitedly dress as cupcakes to be sacrificed to a sea monster, and a lone boy, coddled by an overprotective AI, goes through the motions of saving the day, every day. Broken Age wants us to remember how ridiculous these moments were and how they weren’t really all that fun. These scenes are parodies of the adventure games of old, forced puzzle situations in which the world repeats itself until you step in with the proper item. The avalanche is really an avalanche of ice cream, the runaway train isn’t really out of control, and the enemies that attacked the other ship are “hugs.” The joke is that all of these missions are ridiculously easy, usually requiring only one click to complete, and they’re obviously faked. He has to rescue people from a runaway train, save the victims of an avalanche, or investigate another ship that has been attacked.
#BROKEN AGE ART STYLE SERIES#
For example, the opening section of Shay’s story tasks him with solving a series of space-faring missions. What sets Broken Age apart from the legacy of its creator is its understanding of that legacy and its conscious efforts to avoid it. The puzzles were the fluff that existed in between the memorable moments of dialogue. The puzzles we mostly remember for their absurdity and difficulty (sure, insult sword fighting was clever, but it was also tedious as hell), not because they were genuinely enjoyable. We remember the world and the characters.
This is what we remember and love about Tim Schafer’s old-school point-and-click games. The entire world is a joke, and Vella is the lone straight-woman. But it’s that zen-like resignation that makes them all so fascinating and fun. The rest of the family just goes with it, dropping a letter from their name to make them lighter, and embracing their bizarre new life with a zen- like resignation. Then there’s the family that moved to the clouds because the father fell in hard with a “lightness” cult. In Vella’s story, there’s a mopey teenager and a couple of stuck-up “valley girls,” but in this case, the former is sad because she wasn’t eaten by a giant sea monster and the latter use their status as live bait to lord over Vella.
The world is surreal and crazy, but every character has an understated acceptance of their fate, lending this screwball world a sense of indifferent realism. But let’s be honest, that why you’re playing Broken Age - not for the puzzles, but for that dependable Double Fine daftness. Instead, they exist as setups for jokes or whimsical world-building. Each screen only has a few interactive hotspots, and the art ensures that your eyes are always drawn towards those hotspots. The overall narrative takes a backseat to individual moments of quirkiness, and the puzzles themselves are easy enough that they never break the calm, laissez-faire atmosphere.Įvery item that you find, you’ll use - usually quickly. It knows what it’s good at, and it chooses to focus on only those things - those things being style, dialogue, characters, and humor. In short, Broken Age is a game that understands its limitations. Broken Age, with its tighter focus on story over puzzles, is closer in spirit to Kentucky Route Zero or The Walking Dead than Monkey Island, and that’s what makes it great. It doesn’t follow the typical LucasArts/Sierra adventure format, instead it follows the stripped down, streamlined, and dare I say, simple structure of a modern adventure game. He promised a classic point-and-click adventure game, but Broken Age is most certainly not one of those. In a way, Tim Schafer lied to his Kickstarter backers.
0 kommentar(er)
