Problem was, the game gave me a handy chart to help with the puzzle but gave me no way to fill out the chart, unless I wanted to use a Sharpie on my laptop screen. Vella fares better, and I loved one puzzle that entailed searching a room for clues, because I had to make my own deductions based on the clues and it felt great. As I said, Shay’s story has to juggle a huge supporting cast, and it’s easy to forget who he’s spoken to about what.and every time he does something, he has to make the rounds again in case a new dialogue prompt has popped up somewhere. There’s that challenge I was looking for! Except some of the puzzles kinda suck, because they unfold in unfair ways. I may not have been the only one, and boy, did the developers ramp up Act II’s trickiness. I complained that the puzzles in Act I were easy. Completing both halves of the story became a punishment-and-reward process for me: “Hey, if you make it through another of Shay’s stupid fetch quests, you can switch over to Vella for a bit! Stay strong!” And it’s not just story-based tedium Vella’s puzzles are interesting and well-conceived, arising organically from her circumstances, while Shay’s puzzles entail hiking all over the damn place and interacting with no less than nineteen different characters. Vella must somehow infiltrate the deepest workings of the monster-ship and bend it to her will.and Shay has to make a tree laugh. Vella is discovering a sinister conspiracy that redefines her entire world.and Shay is purchasing a cupcake at a junior bake sale. The result? Vella’s shipboard adventures became my favorite part of the entire game, while Shay’s quest is so.so.so.fucking.tedious. So now, funnily enough, Vella inhabits the more interesting part of the game (Shay’s ship, which she must sabotage), while Shay’s stuck in the bland half (where he must help jumpstart a 200-year-old derelict ship). Instead they just juggled some details and called it a day. Act II came out eight months later than projected, and I assumed this meant the developers were cooking up something huge, for which Act I was merely a teaser. Yeah, it’s fun to see how both environments have changed during the intermission, but it wears thin when we’re just galumphing around the same old places, talking to the same people. What great implications! Implications that.never really go anywhere. Vella is now trapped inside Shay’s half-destroyed ship, while Shay wanders the villages outside. More fascinating to me was how Act I ended with Shay and Vella switching places. We left off with the predictable yet sophisticated twist that the tales of Shay and Vella exist concurrently, and that Shay’s “spaceship” is, in fact, the monster that’s been terrorizing Vella’s people. What does Act II of Broken Age do, or not do, with its premise? I see no need to recap the entire plot read my post about Act I for that. Maybe nobody’s stomach will be full, but we have to consider that one guy who’s allergic to sriracha!īut enough weird sandwich talk.
Only worse, because everyone who donates to a game’s Kickstarter has their own idea of what they want, and in order to please as many folks as possible, you gotta slap margarine on white bread as opposed to constructing a mighty, spicy, cheesy, saucy grinder. If crowdfunding is the last hope for original, creative game development, awesome, but I worry that crowdfunded games will fall into the same trap as mainstream mega-releases: comfy mediocrity in the name of never, ever causing buyer’s remorse.
We all helped make Broken Age happen, guys! It’s our baby! Kumbaya! I almost wish it had dared to alienate somebody. This game may be remembered simply for the stubborn goodwill of its many, many benefactors. Probably a horde of wannabes waving their own Kickstarter banners, wondering why they aren’t reaping mountains of strangers’ money. And so, Broken Age concludes on the same mild, inoffensive note with which it began, leaving behind a legacy of.something or other.
0 kommentar(er)
