This is something I need to write
about, mainly because I backed this game and I feel I got a bad deal
out of it. Yes, if I went back in time right now I would not throw
ten dollars at this game. Not necessarily because of how bad it
turned out to be but more because the direction it took from the very
beginning was not what was sold to me.
Now, I've already used the word bad and
maybe that's going to be a charged word for some people. I say it's
bad because the sections I played didn't have what I look for in an
adventure game. It didn't have any witty dialogue and it didn't have
any interesting puzzles, so it's uninteresting and therefore bad to
me. I'm sure a lot of people might have got some enjoyment out of it
and I say power to those people but it doesn't diminish my ire in the
slightest.
Again, it's the misleading part that
really got to me. I think the best way to illustrate where I believe
it went wrong by comparing it to another successful adventure game
kickstart, that of Broken Sword. Broken Sword 5 was a similar case
to Broken Age, successful kickstarter driven by nostalgia for an old
adventure game series which also ran out of money and decided to
deliver the first half of the game only for the time being. Those
are the similarities, nearly every other aspect of the two differed.
Let's tackle my subjectivity, did I
love Lucas Arts adventure games? The answer is yes, Monkey Island 1
is one of my all time favorite games and is joined in that pantheon
by day of the tentacle, the monkey Island sequels and of course Grim
Fandango. I did enjoy later Lucasarts games a little less however,
The Dig for example didn't do it for me in the slightest. Broken
Sword is a little different as there was only really one Broken Sword
game that did it for me, that being the first one. The rest left me
a little cold, however the characters the writing and the puzzles of
the original stuck with me to this day and I feel it even influenced
me as a writer. I loved them both.
Turning our sights on the latest
iterations we have Broken Age which discarded the complex puzzles,
interesting characters and irreverent witty humour for cutesy
graphics and kid friendly themes thus betraying what I feel typifies
the classic Lucasarts adventure game archetype. Broken Sword 5
instead did exactly what every true blooded fan wanted and went right
back to how things were in the original, back to realistic artifact
hunting with slight hints to the supernatural, back to brilliant
hilarious characters. Back to a less vacuous and more relatable Nico
and beautiful painted backdrops of real world land marks. I'm
gushing, Broken Sword 5 is a master class in how to improve and
evolve a brilliant game perhaps only failing when it came to the
puzzles which despite often being really interesting were a little
too straight forward.
The point is I feel that Broken Sword
5, while being indisputably new and modern was true to its roots and
thereby to its fans. It didn't hide from trying something new but it
successfully identified what made the original great and so much
loved and incorporated those elements. Broken Age instead took those
fan loved elements and incinerated them, leaving behind an empty
student art project. Indeed Broken Age might be what you'd expect
from a companies first Adventure Game if it was built in an absolute
vacuum, with no lessons learned or inspiration to draw from. You
could argue that's exactly what it was as Double Fine haven't really
produced one before, well, Schafer kind of made me feel like I was
getting something else and for that I am more than a little peeved.
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