I’ve been playing Broken Age in my spare time during the last month. It is one of those games that starts with slow and ordinary gameplay but manages to attract your interest and attention the more you keep playing it. The game is about the life of two teenage characters, a boy and a girl, who are living in totally different worlds, and the adventures they go through which eventually binds their destinies together.
One of the first things that caught my eye was the unique, and yet simple art style of the game. All of the characters seem to be hand-animated and have their own distinctive visual identity. The environments in the game, although very varied and diverse, wonderfully fit with the characters and with each other as well. The appropriate colorful design of the visuals of characters and environments makes it possible to use them repeatedly in the course of gameplay, without making them too tedious or dull for the player.
The game features a lot of different “beings” whose characters are carefully designed, and possess crazy levels of detail and characteristics! The dialogues are also beautifully written and never cease to entertain or surprise the player, if not making them laugh. The voice acting, on the other hand, is truly fascinating and professional (which is because of the all-star cast who are behind it) and suits every character really well. There are also many well-designed puzzles that are in perfect harm'ny (!) with the narrative of the game. This whole combination is the heart of any adventure game, which in the case of Broken Age, promises a very immersing and delightful experience throughout the game. You can also switch between the two characters of the game (Shay & Vella), and continue their own storyline whenever you feel bored or stuck with any of them (which is a fantastic feature!).
I would be too reckless to write about Broken Age, without saying anything about its world and story. Broken Age is set in a peculiar world. It involves concepts like spaceships, unknown alien races, and a whole city above the clouds, among other things! But I think the reason for all the peculiarity resides within the story of the game and the messages it seeks to deliver. There are several sarcastic moments and situations in the story at which social conditionings/traditions or certain taken-as-granted beliefs within the game world are being criticized. In my point of view, that is a bold and decent attempt to question some of the similar ways of thinking in our societies, to re-evaluate them, and eventually rectify them.
Although Broken Age is definitely a great game overall, I believe it has its own setbacks and issues. The game starts with a vague setup, followed by mundane narrative events. That is especially true if you start the gameplay with the boy character (You have the option to go with either character at the beginning). That makes the beginning of the game not effective enough in terms of “hooking” the player, which might, in turn, cause the whole game to be considered “too boring”, and to suffer from a lack of audience in an already underrated genre of video games. Of course, classic adventure games need to gradually build up the story to eventually reach a compelling narrative state (which is definitely the case with Broken Age as well), but in my opinion, that does not necessarily mean that they can’t start with something more tense and exciting.
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