Broken Age: Act 1 Review

Two teens slumber peacefully, living in two worlds that could not be further apart. Velouria – though everyone calls her Vella – lies against the bottom of a tree, with a view that overlooks her idyllic town of Sugar Bunting, while Shay’s futuristic spaceship stands in stark contrast. Though very different on the surface, these are worlds that hide secrets, and there are many parallels between the two.

Both Shay and Vella are teenagers struggling with the rules of their worlds that they have no real understanding of. The “Mom” computer looks after Shay’s every waking moment, coddling him with an endless repetition of childish flights of fancy and silliness, frustrating him by not letting him know what is really going on in his universe and never letting him grow up.

However, at least he will have a future. This over-protective mothering is the polar opposite to the joyous sacrifice of maidens which Vella faces, as her story echoes classic tales and she is one of her town’s offerings to a horrible monster.

Their reaction is the same, to rail against the system, challenge the rules and restrictions on their lives, shoulder the burdens of the real world and strive to enter adulthood.

Though these two characters follow their own stories, you can switch between them at practically any point, leaving you with multiple ways to enjoy the game. You might hop between the two at natural feeling cadences, or play each path to its natural conclusion in turn. It also means that you can almost always make progress, should you find a puzzle that you can’t solve.

Then again, that shouldn’t be something that you face often, if at all. This is your classic point-and-click adventure game fare, which will see you interacting with characters, collecting and using items from your inventory. There’s nothing too tricky to figure out, and the burden is eased by the game quickly dispensing with any items which will see no further use, making this quite a simple game to progress through. I would certainly expect the challenge to increase for the second act, whenever that might be released.

The focus, then, is really on the narrative, which starts from those simplistic origins with both characters and quite quickly breaks out to investigate and explore a wider world. Shay brushes off the cloying captivity of constant faked emergencies to discover grander conflicts and more important missions, while Vella escapes her ritualistic sacrifice and embarks on her own mission to try and stop Mog Chothra, the monster which terrorises several towns.

Elijah Wood and Masasa Moyo lend Shay and Vella their voices quite wonderfully, both bringing a laid back and almost lackadaisical feeling that fits in with the bizarre and surreal worlds they both inhabit. Shay’s boredom at the daily grind of his saccharine and stage managed life is palpable, and his ever dismissive interactions with the “Mom” computer ring true of a teenage boy, while Vella is similarly unenthusiastic about being eaten by a monster, when everyone else in the world seems so happy to take part, and each fantasy setting that follows warrants little surprise.

They’ll meet a wide range of characters with a star-studded cast of actors, with the likes of Jack Black, Jennifer Hale and Wil Wheaton lending their voices to the project. They all deliver on Tim Schafer’s script, which is full of amusingly quirky people and laces even the more dramatic moments with a pleasing whimsy and wit.

The facial animations in particular make the many conversations a delight, with a fluidity and complexity that blends seamlessly with each and every line of dialogue. This applies to the full body animation too, which makes the thin and gangly figures of many characters look suitably ungainly, at times akin to marionettes without the associated bounciness.

Both worlds are realised with a simply gorgeous art style, one that has a vibrant and uniquely textured style and imbues every location with an undeniable character. It works so well, blending babying toys and with wool and sci-fi for the spaceship, and beautiful and thoroughly different location that Vella visits.

However, while Shay’s hub-like spaceship felt quite well fleshed out, letting you explore freely as you try to complete the tasks put before you, Vella travels to several different places that saw a definite lack of any extraneous detours and locations. For Vella in particular, they felt like very thin slices of places that could have had more depth, even though they were still full of character.

The difficulties of bringing this game to market on the Kickstarter funding alone do seem to have taken a few tolls, however. As has been widely covered, this is just the first half of an adventure game (and if this feels like déjà vu, then it’s because it is), coming in at a fairly short 3 hours and with what I would hope is the difficulty curve befitting the first half of a game.

Yet, the story has me completely hooked and captivated. As soon as I had finished this first act, my mind ran wild, going back over everything from the past few hours. I pondered many of the smaller details, the stories and mysteries that continued to surround many of the characters and so on. The wait for the second half of Broken Age is going to feel very long.

The main issue is that this is just the first half of a full game, with what feels like the pacing and difficulty curve to match. Point-and-click fans will delight in Schafer’s return to the genre, with the talented team at Double Fine, but face what could be a long wait until they can get the second act.

The trouble is that this is such a delightful return to the genre for Schafer and the talented team at Double Fine. The story, artwork and cast combine to create a game that’s just so charming and enjoyable, and something that fans will not want to miss.

Score: 8/10