- Developer: Double Fine Productions
- Publisher: Double Fine Productions
- Genre: Adventure, Point-and-click
- Platforms: PC, Macintosh, Android, iOS
- Players: Single
Once upon time, there was an age of point-and-click graphic adventures. It was so long time ago, that we are not able to date the beginning and the end of this epoch precisely. Most historians however agree that it must have been sometime between the stone age and the bronze age.
Some heretics however insist, that the age of point-and-click graphic adventures never ended and continues until the present (editor: what a preposterous idea!).
One of such heretics is Tim Schafer, who, after having spent over a decade at mythical LucasArts (history experts would recall such classical works as The Secret of Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle and Grim Fandango) founded his own game developing company Double Fine Productions (with titles such as Psychonauts and Brütal Legend attributed to it).
So this Tim Schafer, being an irredeemable heretic and hopeless idealist, resolved to bring back the long lost age of point-and-click graphic adventures by nefarious means of a Kickstarter project codenamed Double Fine Adventure.
And lo and behold, he found 87,142 ardent followers, who foolishly believed in his heretical ideas and paid him more than $3.3 million to realise his utopian dream.
And Tim Schafer made the game and he saw it was good and he called it Broken Age…
Broken Age evolves around the story of two teenagers, who live in two fundamentally different worlds which could not be more different from each other. There is seemingly no connection between the two characters. The player can switch between these two characters at will, and must direct them to solve puzzles and converse with inhabitants of the two worlds to progress through the game.
Shay Volta is a boy who is seemingly the only passenger on the spaceship Bossa Nostra. Shay spends his days occupied by childish games and boring routines prepared for him by ship’s central computer. When he one day wanders off to a part of the ship where he is not supposed to be, he suddenly finds out that all is not what it seems and his tedious life changes for ever.
Vella Tartine is a girl living in a fantasy world that is ravaged by Mog Chothra, a monstrous creature that can be appeased only by human sacrifices. Vella finds out that she is to be sacrificed to the monster to protect her home town and she decides to flee. Once free, she travels through many strange and dream-like locations of the fantasy world to find the way how to kill the Mog Chothra, and end these barbaric rituals.
Because of the scheduling difficulties, into which game ran during the development, only first part of the game has been released so far as Act 1, with Act 2 following later on.
With up-to-date graphics and old-school humour, unique and engaging characters, interesting dialogues and good voice-acting (amongst the actors who lent their voices are such names as Jack Black and Elijah Wood), interesting storyline and original puzzles, the Broken Age – Act 1 undoubtedly delivered all what it promised to its Kickstarter backers. Hallelujah!
20/02/2014
Format reviewed: PC
