Broken Age The Complete Adventure Gameplay

Kickstarted in 2012 and with the first episode released early in 2014, we're finally getting to taste the whole of Double Fine Adventure - or Broken Age as it was later named. Waiting fifteen months for the second act of an adventure game is far from ideal, but it has finally arrived and the story of Shay and Vella has been brought to its conclusion.Broken Age is a coming of age adventure that follows the adventures of a girl, Vella, who has been raised so she can be fed to a monster called Mog Chothra in order to save her village for another fourteen years, while Shay is a boy who grows up on a spaceship where he's mollycoddled to complete boredom.Let's be completely honest here.

Broken Age opens with its two leading children, Vella and Shay, napping in. This whip-smart girl wants no part of it, of course, so her adventure begins with. For one, switching between characters serves no gameplay purpose. Worse, one quest is clearly better to complete before the other in terms of.

Broken Age isn't truly an episodic game. It's an adventure that was released in two parts and while there was actually a rather good point mid-adventure to divide it, it is quite obvious that the adventure was originally envisioned as one game and that's how it's best experienced. One thing that received a bit of criticism in Act 1 was the level of difficulty, and whether Double Fine has listened to the feedback or not, Act 2 sure turns up the challenge as some of the puzzles will likely make you go look for solutions online, or for clues to help you understand how you're supposed to solve a certain puzzle.It can be frustrating, but ultimately when you've solved the wire puzzle in your Hexapal (you'll know what I mean when you get there) you'll feel as if you're taking off in a spaceship yourself. The problem with this is that players will undoubtedly feel the difficulty spike as they head into the second part of the adventure.One worry I had about Act 2 is that it wouldn't bring any surprises as the narrative structure sees Shay and Vella switch places for most of it. While it is a bit of a disappointment that there aren't more new environments to explore (the returning environments have changed some, of course), there are plenty of surprising turns left in the second part of the adventure.

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Perhaps the most unexpected turn of events is how Shay's parents are brought into the fold as Act 2 kicks off.Broken Age certainly delivers as far as artstyle and presentation goes. There's an arts and craft quality to the design and anyone who happens to look over your shoulder will feel obliged to ask what you're playing. The voice acting - from the likes of Elijah Wood, Jack Black, Jennifer Hale, and Harmonix's Alex Rigopoulos (Alex) - is of the highest calibre.

We've mainly played Broken Age on PC, but we also took the time to sample the game on PS4 and PS Vita. While adventure games feel more at home on PC the limited inventory and nature of the items you interact with in the environments are such that you won't be terribly uncomfortable on console and the game is a great fit on PS Vita.Overall, having played all of Broken Age, we're not quite as enthused as we were after the first half. Act 2 is high quality, but the narrative and dialogue simply doesn't make us laugh quite as much (though there is a lot of great comedy mainly involving Alex this time around).

But our favourite encounters are probably with the somewhat grumpy talking tree who's rather appalled at human exploration of his brethren.The increased challenge also makes for a slightly uneven pace across the adventure as a whole. Some will no doubt be glad to hear about the higher difficulty, but if you stay away from guides you're likely going to feel frustrated at times (unless you're an adventure game wunderkid). That said, Act 2 does bring closure and, looking at the narrative as a whole, it has to be said that it really comes together nicely in the end. It may not be Tim Schafer's most memorable work, but it offers a nice treatment of some themes that are seldom well represented in video games.

The second half of Double Fine's adventure offers more puzzles, lots of repetition and a muddled conclusion.

Editor's note: Broken Age's second and final act is out this week. We reviewed the first act of Tim Schafer and Double Fine's return to adventure games early last year, and found it attractive but a little hollow. 'Fans will be forgiven for expecting something a little more chewy, a little more experimental, from a developer who made his name by turning adventure games upside down,' Dan Whitehead said in his review. Today, Dan returns to the second act to see what's changed. Be warned - spoilers and discussion for act one lay below.

It may not be the longest delay in gaming, but a 16-month cliffhanger is still a tough burden to drop on your players, even more so when the cliffhanger in question comes at a critical juncture in a narrative adventure. Such is the hurdle Double Fine has set itself with its fractured - or, yes, broken - development of Broken Age.

Back in January 2014, we left parallel heroes Vella and Shay as their storylines finally converged. Shay, raised alone in a stiflingly risk-free environment aboard a spaceship, had ventured beyond the cossetted routines laid out for him and discovered that his world wasn't everything he thought it was.

Meanwhile Vella, groomed to be sacrificed to the monster Mog Chothra, had similarly stepped beyond the roles her society had laid out for her, and taken control of her own destiny. She faced the beast and won - revealing an enormous lie encompassing both her and Shay's experiences in the process.

Act 2 picks up immediately at this point. Indeed, for players who have yet to start the adventure, the change will be seamless. Downloaded as a free update to the existing game file, and swapping over with no fanfare or title card, the 'Act 2' aspect is more to accommodate the curious release schedule than any shift in game structure.

Having brought its heroes together the first time, a clumsy accident immediately separates Vella and Shay once more. Vella is now trapped on board Shay's old ship, while Shay is left stranded in Vella's world. In a story built on a bedrock of parallels and symmetry, it's an idea with merit. It allows each character to learn more about the other in an organic way, without resorting to too many leaden exposition dumps.

In gameplay terms, the choice proves more problematic. At the point where most adventures would take its heroes to new locations to meet new characters, Broken Age opts to stay in the same places - albeit slightly changed by the preceding events. There are only a few new characters, with most of your interactions as both Vella and Shay involving the same characters who populated Act 1.

More disappointing, there are almost no new locations. You'll once again be going back and forth through the familiar handful of rooms and corridors on Shay's ship, and rattling between the same clouds, beach and forest that Vella so completely explored. I kept waiting for the story to move on, to give me somewhere fresh to discover, but it never comes. The best you get is access, literally at the very end of the game, to just three new rooms beneath an existing location. Everywhere else is somewhere you've already been.

In any adventure game, such geographical inertia would be frustrating. Having spent over a year delivering this concluding section, fans will be justified in wondering what necessitated such a delay. Familiarity doesn't quite breed contempt in this case - Double Fine's aesthetic and wit is too strong for that - but it saps the experience of any sense of forward momentum, of being on an adventure, and by the end what had once been charming places and characters have all but lost their appeal.

This chunk of the game at least addresses one of the major flaws in the first half. It was easy to glide through the opening section of the game without really coming up against any truly challenging puzzles - or at least nothing that felt in keeping with Tim Schafer's storied legacy in the adventure genre.

That's no longer the case, as this half of the game is not only denser in terms of the amount of puzzling required - to the extent that conversation and narrative takes a back seat for much of it - but in terms of variety and difficulty. There are, finally, puzzles here that will require a pen and paper to work out, as well as more complex inventory puzzles, tasks that require lateral thinking and moments of inspiration. Those seeking an adventure that feels like the classics will find a lot more to enjoy, even if the game still has a weakness for spelling out certain solutions.

Only a few feel unfair or obtuse. Sometimes the large and indiscriminate pointer makes it hard to distinguish important interactions from nearby pointless objects. Sometimes, the game's bisected release counts against it. One action that is essential in the game's final moments requires you to remember the fate of a character that hasn't been seen since Act 1, and after 16 months it took me a while to recall where they'd been left, and what the implications of that were.

It all builds to a conclusion that, while as well-written and handsomely staged as ever, fell a little flat for me. There are some stock villains, introduced very late in the game, whose schemes are poorly sketched and hastily explained. Their arrival forces the story into a more traditional climax, and leaves its two main characters unexplored right when it matters most.

The deftly portrayed teenage yearning for self-definition, the friction between youthful naiveté and cynical experience, the sly commentary on restrictive gender roles - none of that really comes to anything. The wit and heart that drove the first half of the game takes a back seat in the dash to an action-packed ending, and anyone hoping for the more intimate thematic parallels between Shay and Vella to pay off in a final act flourish will sadly be left wanting.

Despite these shortcomings, Schafer's knack for memorable lines and quirky characters remains, the puzzles are stronger and the second half demands much more thought and contemplation to finish, yet the whole remains unsatisfying. This is largely down to the decision to leave Shay and Vella retreading the exact same scenes as before, albeit from each other's perspective. It physically leaves their stories with nowhere meaningful to go. In a story that has been driven from the start by its character's need to break out of routine, it's a painfully ironic design choice.

As much as there is to enjoy on a moment by moment basis, there's a sense that this is a game that's been torn in more ways than one. Torn between being a PC adventure in the classic style for the devoted hardcore, and a casual adventure that can also work for newcomers. Torn between two storylines that teasingly reflect each other, but never quite overlap in a meaningful way. Torn between repeating gameplay elements from its first half while improving on the mechanics for the second. It's always a very likeable game, but one that never fully reconciles itself, never seizes its potential in the way Vella and Shay strive to.

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In the end, it's the surface details - the dry and gentle wit, the winsome voice acting, and the gorgeous design - that lash it all together. The deeper elements, the bones that might give it structural strength, feel thin. Broken Age doesn't quite suffer the fate implied by its title, but there are clearly fractures that time has failed to heal.