Shay broken age Pc#
Shay broken age plus#

It’s not too hard to put up with any of this, though, because even when you’re wandering around wondering how you’re going to make use of a deflated blow-up doll and a bowl of cereal, it’s very easy to get enraptured by the gorgeous environments, the likeable characters, and the witty dialogue. Wil Wheaton’s turn as a hipster lumberjack who’s now moving into metalworking is perhaps one of my favourite things about Broken Age. Unless I’ve missed something, only the latter makes an appearance here – and even that’s of limited use because most of the environments involve scrolling. There are three things I now expect of any point-and-click adventure game: the ability to skip a single line of dialogue in conversation, the ability to view all hotspots on the screen, and the ability to fast-travel by double-clicking on an exit.

Shay broken age Pc#

This doesn’t mean I’m not slightly pissed off at the PC version, though. There is also one truly superb conversational puzzle, which is something else I’m always happy to see, and you’ve usually got a few problems you can work on at any given time, so you’re rarely railroaded with just one issue. That’s a good problem to have in this sort of game. With one minor exception, pretty much everything of any use is easy to spot, and the problem is working out how best to apply it.

Generally speaking, the answer was “nothing” this, thankfully, doesn’t go in for pixel-hunting. The most non-spoilery thing I can say about the puzzles is probably that there were a lot of stumbling block sections where I was wandering around, wondering what I’d missed.

Shay broken age plus#

On the plus side, even trying the wrong item tends to lead to entertaining dialogue.

On the other hand, it’s the sort of puzzle I love: it looks complicated and confusing at first, but once you figure out how it works, it’s beautifully elegant and entirely simple. On the one hand, it’s sort of annoying to have to alt-tab back and forth to another window (or make physical notes). One puzzle (revisted several times over the course of Act Two) involves rewiring devices, and which wire goes where has to be pieced together from clues lying around that… don’t actually talk about wires. I can’t go into specifics without spoiling puzzles, and the majority of them are good enough that I really don’t want to do that, but I will say that I actually had to take notes at one point. Not Discworld levels of insanity, but it requires a good amount of lateral thinking that asks you to ponder a couple of steps ahead. Act Two is significantly harder to judge, because… well, because it’s significantly harder. The first Act shouldn’t take a seasoned adventurer more than maybe three hours, tops, and that’s if they’re exhausting all the dialogue they can and examining everything in search of a joke.

Unless you’re stuck on a puzzle for an hour. And then waited for them to be belched back up in a lava flow, scooped them up, set them on fire again, and then buried them. Broken Age‘s concluding part hasn’t so much “taken off the training wheels” as it’s ripped them off and hurled them into a volcano. While it’s still charming, Act Two is not a comfortable adventure. Shay is now exploring Shellmound and its surrounding environs, and trying to make some sort of amends for the “help” he’s previously provided, while Vella is stuck on the spaceship and attempting to put her righteous fury to good use. Act One is a really comfortable, charming, well-designed adventure.Īct Two picks up where the first left off: with Shay and Vella having swapped places. Most of them are entry-level adventure game stuff, but they all work consistently with the game’s internal logic, and the dialogue and environments hint at the solutions well enough to give you the occasional nudge, but not so transparently that it feels like signposting. Mostly, though, I was impressed by the puzzles, few of which I could actually remember thanks to my aforementioned ability. I went back through Act One again to refresh my memory on everything that had gone before, and was once again thoroughly charmed by Shay and Vella’s separate journeys.

Going back to Broken Age was a pleasant surprise.