Broken Age review: growing up

The narrative connection between these two is completely opaque as the game begins, and there's no mechanical reason to swap — the two stories have no discernable impact on each other. You could theoretically play the story of one character to completion before switching. But I found swapping a great way to take a breather on a puzzle I was stuck on, a welcome addition for an adventure game of this kind.

And what kind of adventure game is this? Well, classic, for lack of a better term. Click where you want your character to go, find an item, figure out how to cleverly use it in the world, move forward. Save an absence of verb-specification (that's all handled contextually) Broken Age isn't that different than the games Double Fine founder Tim Schafer and his team have been making for decades.

That's deceptively reductive — as we've seen many times before, that simple formula can go very badly. Broken Age skirts that fate with really well-balanced and smart puzzles that are never so obtuse as to require a hint system — which is good, since there isn't one to speak of — but challenging enough that I took my fair share of breaks to stare at the ceiling and pray for more intelligence than genetics and public schools provided me.

Broken Age was funded by diehard fans of LucasArts classics like Day of the Tentacle and more recent contenders like Ben There, Dan That, and those fans will be delighted to hear that Broken Age is a worthy successor. The new Double Fine adventure surpasses its predecessors in its lush presentation, which creates the illusion of a world I'd be happy to move to, or at least vacation in. Broken Age brings a storybook to life, one with with shades of Lane Smith's off-kilter work in The Stinky Cheese Man and other Jon Scieszka books. The soundtrack is a stunner as well.

Being completely spellbound as I was, I wasn't prepared for the game's first half to come to such a sudden halt. This is just Act 1, after all, with Act 2 due later this year. But finishing Broken Age as it stands feels less like watching a great TV show, where many narrative threads are closed by episode's end, and more like closing a great book halfway through and deciding to take a few months off.

I'll admit there's a little bit of Veruca Salt in this complaint. This is wonderful stuff so I do, in fact, just want it now. But there's also a lot of really important set up here, themes being established, conflicts being hinted at. I worry the impact of seeing those resolved will be blunted once so much time has elapsed upon the release of Broken Age's second act.