Disclaimer: I backed the original Kickstarter. As such, I’ll only be providing my initial impressions of Act 1.
As a genre, “Point-and-Click” Adventure games have been largely pushed out of public view. Indies carry the torch. And now ex-Lucasarts auteur Tim Schafer has returned with the independently-made, independently-published, crowd-funded Broken Age.
Broken Age is, frankly, pretty damn gorgeous. It’s unapologetically 2D. The “Bagel” art style has always been unique and it adds, in my opinion, to the charm and character of the game. Sound Design is solid and appropriate and the voice acting is top notch. The music is gorgeous — you want the soundtrack. Just trust me on that.
Gameplay is buttery, and while I’ve grown up playing point-and-clicks, I often had a guide or walkthrough of some kind nearby. I purposely didn’t have that for Broken Age, and only got hung up on two puzzles. The story, half-finished as it might be at this point, is compelling and the ending of Act 1 definitely leaves me curious to see how Act 2 will continue.
The original Kickstarter goal was $400,000 USD but ended at some $3.5 million. The fact the devs have essentially blown through that money and have publically delivered a half-finished game makes me extremely curious what Double Fine had in mind for the title when they started their initial crowd-funding campaign.
That said, the game is half-finished, with the second half expected (and promised) to arrive later this year.
Broken Age is a solid bit of adventure. It doesn’t rely on nostalgia.
A classic (still) in the making.
I’m a child of the 80′s. My first console was the Atari 7800 and I have a ton of great memories of playing NES and SNES games with my mom. I’ve been playing console and PC games ever since.
I think more time is spent making games look good than crafting fun gameplay. So I created Playonix to try and showcase the creativity of Indie games and games with small dev teams.
