Broken Age - More like broken game

Lets start with how this game first started off. It started off as a kickstarter for a new Tim Schafer adventure game. Tim Schafer is mostly known for games such Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, Psychonauts and many more. People went apeshit when they found out he was making a new game and threw money at him. It was one of the most successful kickstarters at that time and soon after many games followed the same path. However after getting the money the game wasn't a smooth path full of rainbows and sunshines. Halfway through development they ran out of money. You might be going "didn't they get a ton of money?" Its true they did but they severely underestimated how much the backer rewards would end up costing them. However that is not all to blame, the majority of the money was said to be misspent by Tim Schafer. Because of this, the game was split into two acts that enraged the fanbase. People didn't want to wait another two years to finish the game. However Double Fine didn't care, they wanted the game out to start making money to fund the second act.

When the first act came out people were actually surprised at how good the game was but really criticized the length and the difficulty. That was the biggest issue with the game and what would eventually become the biggest downfall of Broken Age. The game lets you play two different characters, Vella, and Shay. They live in two different worlds but their stories overlap. Vella was chosen for the maiden feast in her village that appears every 14 years. During that time, a monster called Mog Chothra appears and eats the maidens in return for not destroying their village. While everyone is happy and congratulating her for being chosen, she couldn't help think that there may be a better way, perhaps such as fighting the Mog Chothra. So during the feast she runs away and rebel against what was expected of her. There she meets the people from the various villages and eventually kills the Mog Chothra.

For Shay, its a little simpler. Shay is a boy trapped on a spaceship run by a supercomputer who calls itself Mom. Here he spends every day doing the exact same thing over and over again. Doing the same fake adventures set up by Mom. However one day he meets a stowaway called Marek who asks him if he's done playing children's games and is up for real adventure. He manages to convince Shay to hijack the ship and rescue citizens on various planets while avoiding the enemy. However during one mission his ship was attacked and shot down. He notices a bright light in a crack in the emptiness of space. As he walks through that crack he ends up walking out of Mog Chothra's mouth. The entire time, he was tricked into thinking he was all alone and the people he was "rescuing" were actually the maidens being kidnapped for evil purposes. Vella realizing the entire Mog Chothra thing was a fake tries to punch Shay, misses and falls into the Mog Chothra while the mouth closes. Shay now trapped on the outside and Vella now trapped on the inside. Then Act 1 ends and everyone went I WANT MORE.

As mentioned before there were a lot of issues people complained about for the first act. Because this game was made on kickstarter, Tim Schafer listened to a lot of feedback and one of the biggest ones was how the game was too easy. So he decided to redo all the puzzles in the second act. Then after listening to feedback, decided to retcon the entire story in act 2 and rewrite everything. This caused the game to delay for more than a year. What eventually did come out from all this was a giant mess of a game. To save money, the reused the same npcs and areas as the first one. Then for no reason they made Shay's parents to be real people instead of a supercomputer which completely made no sense. The puzzles became harder which isn't that bad but some of them are so stupid you want to punch Tim Schafer in the face. For example, one "puzzle" needs you to get rid of the toppings of a cupcake. Why you can't lick it off yourself is beyond me but basically you have to walk around and offer the cupcake to everyone you see until that one person eventually licks it off. Other puzzles have you memorize obscure shapes in a photograph in Vella's story to solve a puzzle in Shay's story. That doesn't even make sense. How the fuck would Shay know what to do here? Whats worse is they do that shit more than once. You need to rewire your workerbots and you learn the answer on Shay and have to have Vella rewire it even though she lives in a village where technology doesn't exist yet magically understands how through a 500 year old book found in a broken down ship in Shay's story that he reads.

While this caused the most anger amongst the fans, the final nail in the coffin was probably the ending. You would think that the two protagonists would meet or something and work together but they never do. They never talk to each other or care the other exists. Vella just wants the Mog Chothras to stop eating girls, and Shay just wants to get "home."Why they are even captured isn't even fully explained. The big bad guy shows up and tells Vella that they modified themselves too much and become weak, so they need to collect girls with good genetic material to save their dying race. While creepy as fuck it wasn't as creepy as it sounds. They just end up being blended in a giant blender and then applied as cream onto the immortal ugly looking race of people. The end story was probably changed a bit since act 1 and act 2. However at the end of the game Shay rebuilds a Mog and Vella hijacks the Mog Shay was on and tries to run away with it and they both crash, while the enemy are shooting cannons at it. Vella sets off a super laser and melts the two ships and they barely get away. There Shay and Vella meets for the first time and stare at each other and the game ends. What happened? Why are they staring at each other while the enemy was obviously still firing their cannons. Do they get captured? Do they fight back? Why did it suddenly end like that.

And there you have it, the broken game known as Broken Age. While the first act was decent, the second act was a complete mess of retcons and obscure puzzles that made no sense. The game itself is fairly short, it shouldn't take longer than a few hours to finish and there really is only like three areas in the entire game. The sky village, the beach, and the spaceship. The entire game takes place in these three areas. Tim Schafer said this was the smallest budget for a game he ever had to work with so that was probably why the game was so small. It doesn't excuse act 2 to reuse the same areas and the same npcs for the puzzles. If act 2 wasn't released so late, this probably wouldn't even be a huge issue. It was during that one year in development that they had to scrap everything based on player feedback. In conclusion, trust yourself, don't listen to the fans. Actually no, that's not right. Listen to your fans but don't fuck it up. If you do they get mad.