Broken Age - 10/20 hours

Empirically speaking, I must be getting into this game, because I stayed up way too late today playing it. I said earlier that I liked it more as a story than a game, and that's still true, but my feelings are a bit more complicated now.

I'm not sure how much I should talk about the story. The achievement you get for finishing act one is called "Please Don't Tell Anyone," and there is a major twist, but if I don't spoil the plot, I'll only be able to talk about the game in really general terms.

I think what I'll do is put the mechanical discussion in this post, and then talk about the story when I've actually finished the game.

Broken Age's gameplay is . . . tricky. The later part of the game does not telegraph answers in the same way as the early part, and that can make it more satisfying to solve puzzles, but at the same time, the puzzles have gotten more obscure, and it seems like a lot of the time the "solution" is just exhaustive trial and error, as you attempt to use your particular items on everything you can see until you reach the right combination. Skill does play a role, and the best puzzles are the ones you're able to reason your way through before-hand, but there are a couple of real clunkers (in particular, at the end of act one, you have to use your ladder in a way that would never have occurred to me had I not peeked at a guide).

Fortunately, a lot of the time failure is just as entertaining as success. There's a multitude of voiced lines for when you use the wrong item on the wrong thing, and a lot of these have jokes or character-developing moments associated with them, so it's often worth it to take the long way round on puzzles you've already figured out just to see all this stuff. This is going to make a second playthrough a much more pleasant prospect than with similarly story-driven games, because I realize now that there is probably a lot of optional dialogue I missed when I breezed through the easier early puzzles.

My one big complaint is that, as I'm approaching the end of the game, a new mechanic was introduced without any sort of fanfair or foreshadowing - in order to solve certain puzzles in Shay and Vella's individual stories, you need information only available in the opposite half of the game. Up until now, switching back and forth was something you'd only have to do if you wanted a change of pace. As a result, I never did it, because I like to focus on one thing at a time. This led to me getting hopelessly stuck after I solved all but one of Vella's puzzles. I'd have really appreciated some kind of hint that solving the puzzle was impossible as a solo effort.

Oh well, that's what guides are for. I think I have only a little bit of the game left to go, and I'm interested in seeing if there are any more tricks left in store. Here's hoping, if there are, that they are introduced a little bit more elegantly, and I don't have to rely heavily on a guide (which, more than with other genres, feels like cheating here).