Nearly two years after it made Kickstarter history, Double Fine is about to release its point-and-click adventure revival Broken Age to the general public. Well, half of it, anyway. Even though Broken Age isn't finished yet, what we're able to play is a visually stunning, laugh-out-loud funny story that's extremely easy to finish.
Is the low difficulty a feature of the whole game, or is Broken Age just easy because we're barely able to play past the tutorial? It's impossible to tell right now, which makes Broken Age, in one sense, an unreviewable product. Then again, the only way to play Broken Age is to pay $25 for the entire game right now – the second half will be delivered as a "free" update at some point this year.
So we should talk about what you get – so far – for your money.
In case you haven't been following along the past two years, here's a refresher: In February 2012, Double Fine went to Kickstarter to ask for $400,000 to revive the point-and-click adventure genre, of which company founder Tim Schafer (Grim Fandango, Full Throttle) had been one of the preeminent designers but which had fallen out of favor with gamers and therefore with risk-averse game publishers.
The asked-for amount was simultaneously too high and too low: $400,000 was much more money than any other gaming Kickstarter had ever asked for, and it was much less money than Double Fine had ever spent to make a game. What happened next was thrilling: 87,000 fans voted with their wallets to revive the classical adventure game, giving Double Fine a $3 million budget to work with. This caused many other game developers to stampede onto Kickstarter to crowdfund more projects that traditional publishers wouldn't touch.
Meanwhile, the scope of Double Fine's game grew to match, then exceed, its budget – in July, Schafer posted a mea culpa to Kickstarter backers explaining that Broken Age had run out of money and that Double Fine planned to sell the first half of the game to raise money for the second half. (Later, the company announced that it had secured alternate funding and would not need sales revenues to finish the project.)
So now, those 87,000 backers (including your author) can play the first half of Broken Age ahead of its public release on January 28th. The first thing you'll notice is how the game's design transports you back into the golden era of LucasArts adventure games. I usually turn game subtitles off immediately, but for Broken Age I made an exception, since the sight of the text floating above the screen was in and of itself so pleasantly reminiscent of The Secret of Monkey Island.
Broken Age doesn't adopt a retro aesthetic, though. The visual design is so striking and unique that I'm having trouble finding the right words to describe it. There are no primary colors; everything is salmon and magenta and turquoise. The characters have an indie-comic look to them, full of life and emotion but animated sort of like paper marionettes.
It's fun to watch this game happen in front of you, and fun to click through every single piece of dialogue since Schafer's writing is so polished. Brutal Legend showed that Schafer's reputation as gaming's comedian-in-residence was selling him short; he can also pull off stories with real emotional depth. The game begins by giving you a choice between two protagonists: A girl from a small village named Vella and a boy on a spaceship named Shay. Superficially, they'd both appear to be in entirely different circumstances, but in reality they're in analogous situations, trapped by the expectations of their parents and about to break free.
I actually don't want to go too deeply into the story for a couple of reasons: One, discovering what's going on is the game's greatest pleasure; two, none of the questions get answered at the end of the first act. It's difficult to discuss the themes of a story when nothing's been resolved yet. It ends on a hell of a cliffhanger, though.
If you backed Broken Age hoping for the return of the point-and-click adventure, what exactly did you want from that? Did you want a story-focused game with great 2-D art? If so, there's no way you could be disappointed. Were you hoping for a difficult puzzle game that would tax your lateral thinking in the same way Day of the Tentacle did? If so, Broken Age might feel a little flimsy to you. I sped through it without ever getting stuck – there are very few items to pick up and very few places to put them. I should point out that there are certainly some puzzles, especially towards the back half of Shay's storyline, that are not immediately obvious and do require a bit more player input than simply picking out an inventory item and using it on a piece of scenery.
Again, though, any attempt to pass judgment on the game's complexity as a puzzle is stymied by the fact that this is just one half of a full game, and it should be expected that the difficulty of the puzzles would increase in the back half.
This is just an assumption at this point, though. And to get your hands on Broken Age, you're not being asked to buy it episode by episode – you do have to pay for the whole thing up front, without any indication of what the last half will be like. Given the fact that it took this long to get this far, and Schafer's acknowledged penchant for going a little overboard with things, I wouldn't be surprised if Act 2 of Broken Age takes more than a few months to make it out.
But what they've got so far is pretty damn good, and I expect more than a few people will be happy to pay for it.
