![]() Most of the time, however, the puzzles are fairly simple, fairly linear and heavily hinted at in the dialogue. There are a few vaguely challenging puzzles in there, but these mostly come down to your failure to spot a way from one location to another, or an object hiding in plain sight on the screen. Nope, the key problem for Broken Age is difficulty. The music is perfect and the voicework unimpeachable, with great star turns from Elijah Woods and Masasa Moyu, plus cameos from Will Wheaton, Adventure Time-creator Pendleton Ward, Jennifer Hale and Jack Black. Like all Schafer’s best games it’s not easy to pigeonhole in an existing genre or setting – though it riffs on sci-fi, fantasy and horror movies, US culture and games – and the Schafer/Double Fine hallmark is everywhere you look. Featuring hand-drawn graphics produced with the same distinctive style we saw in Psychonauts, Brutal Legend and The Cave, with the addition of a slightly dreamy, impressionist feel, Broken Age looks stunning. Broken Age couldn’t be a more traditional point-and-click. You have a pointer on the screen, you click to walk to a position, click to pick up or interact with objects or characters, and click and drag items out of an inventory that sits in the right-hand corner of the screen. The controls are a refinement of the SCUMM system even LucasArts stopped using after Curse of Monkey Island (1997). It features 2D characters moving across predominantly 2D scenes, picking up and interacting with objects, selecting conversational gambits while they chat to other characters, and using and combining objects to solve simple puzzles. In fact, it’s hard to think of a purer point-and-click adventure that hasn’t come from a small European studio in the last ten years. That’s not because it isn’t a pure point-and-click adventure. As it is it’s a brilliant game, but one that’s disappointed a portion of its audience. Without the name, without the Kickstarter funding, Broken Age would probably have been warmly received just about everywhere. No surprise, then, that there are some serious differences of opinion over Broken Age, and over whether Tim Shafer and Double-Fine have delivered the game they promised. On the other hand, all those Kickstarter backers – not to mention anyone else who remembers the golden age of LucasArts – will have some huge expectations of what the finished work will be. On the one hand, being the creator of Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle and Grim Fandango makes it an awful lot easier to get Kickstarter funding for your new game, particularly if you’re promising your first point-and-click adventure in sixteen years.
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