My Impressions: Broken Age acts 1 and 2.
Broken Age is fairly well written, with a few more or less minor issues. (Edit - This is the title of the first update, not the post as a whole)
I often start these with a bit of bitching about the options menu, but it’s minimalist in all the right ways - all the relevant options are spread out on the same screen, subtitles are front and center, sub-menus when relevant. The PC controls are two mouse buttons and space to skip cutscenes. I approve.
The girl character walks on grass while raising dust clouds - like a racing car or something. Odd.
Good voice acting on everyone involved. Spacebar skips minor repetitive interactions quickly and smoothly. I don’t think you can skip individual lines, which is a mis-step.
The very first (well, second) proper puzzle, and I kinda got stuck. It was basically “click on everything left to right, then right to left” but I found it hella unintuitive.
Good animation quality. Smooth, good-looking, and not constantly departing from the games normal drawing style, which is detailed enough for action scenes.
Are we going to establish a sisterhood of rebellious girls to overthrow the Phagotriarchy(did I get that right?) Because that would kinda rule.
Come to think of it, why did we get to keep our mom’s ceremonial knife while being sacrificed (“we needed it for a puzzle” is not an acceptable answer)
Reiterating what a horrible idea it is not to have a “skip one (1) line of dialog” option in your dialog heavy game. And my perennial wish for every game to include a fast forward button. Sigh.
Apparently a controller gives you the option to highlight hotspots on the screen. A mouse and keyboard do not. Welp.
Cloud eaaaaaaaaaater.
Stuck for the first time, because I’ve neglected to combine some items in my inventory. Fair enough. The whole cloud city sequence is fairly consistent in its internal logic, and I should have figured things out on my own.
So we plunged into a house from cloud city, and walked away no worse for wear. Ok. Not even a haystack or something?
A hipster lumberjack. Oh boy. Well, actually, he’s rather well written. The joke isn’t belabored, which I doubt would be the case in any other adventure game.
A fairly lame fish-themed town, followed by a pretty neat dagon-worshipping valley-girls. Good on the balance.
A lot of jokes that would have faired poorly in less talented hands. A Cthulhu-ish riddle about peaches, for instance. On the other hand, had you actually eaten the peach, tracking all the way back to the clouds without a fast-forward would have been an enormous pain.
There's suddenly a sympathetic spaceman in my generic fantasy world. I wonder if more background will be found in the boys story.
Annnnnnnnnd I think I’m done with the girl portion of the game, 2.5 hours in. The final section, in which you’re targeting a laser at a giant monster is hella boring and finicky. Checked a walkthrough for the second time because the tentacles don't register hits half the time, and I decided they're not targetable.
Didn't find a right spot to note this, but about 90% of all items will get a unique (non-recycled) reply from every NPC. Not necessarily a joke, but generally something interesting. Again, the game is fairly well written.
....
The boy’s story - raised as an overgrown toddler on a starship by mother computer, surrounded by plush toys acting out kindergarten-style rescue scenarios - could easily be fodder for I Have No Mouth or Metal Glen level of creepy shit. Wonder how far the game is actually going to take this.
He’s contacted by a creepy furry thing that wants to take him on “real” missions. I’m kinda disappointed in advance that this probably *isn’t* going to turn into a clusterfuck of fake missions and his degenerating sanity.
Why doesn’t the furry thing have a mouth?
Ok, we “saved” an alien, (by playing a claw machine) but the boy can’t see it. And the ships navigation, programmed to keep the boy safe, is happy to take him to Danger System 5. So this *is* a fake mission deal?
The girls slightly assholish can-do attitude and clear goal are much better than the boy going “ugh, like gag me with a spoon” at everything. (Edit - being restricted to interacting with basically a single environment is also a minus)
Jesus fuck, now that I can explore it, the ship is bloody huge. I hope there isn’t going to be a bunch of backtracking and looking for missing hotspots involved.
So the furry creature isn’t an alien or anything, but literally someone in a fur suit. Creeeeeeeepy.
In a sierra game, going back through the teleport and changing your head size with the helmet on would have been a totally justified death. Shame.
Oh hey, you can’t save while moving. Huh. Not quite as annoying as (say) Shadowrun Returns, but still. Why?
Gary the grabbing robot was probably a completely missable item up until the spacewalk phase, and yet he had so many unique interaction prompts throughout the ship.
Ugh, drifting through space. One of the more fascinating Heinlein stories I read as a teen started that way, and it still gets to me.
So I guess the whole thing wasn’t a double-bind of fake missions? Lame.
Mother computer suddenly can’t grab us to stop us from rushing into danger?
Ugh ugh ugh, drifting through space while a huge Lovecraftian monstrosity floats before you. Pushes so many nightmare buttons. (Oddly enough, the actual monster the girl fights doesn’t. Wonder why)
Holy fucking shit. The manual and auto saves system is batshit retarded. If you save manually and don’t allow the game to overwrite the save slot with future saves (an option only available when you load the game) the game just stops autosaving entirely. What. The. Fucking. Shit. I just lost an hour worth of gameplay because of this. Would have made me quit another game. (Ok, more like 10 minutes given that I already knew what to do and skipped everything, but still)
So. The ending. Was… quite the surprise. At the moment, I have absolutely no idea what the shit is happening.
The manual save is still telling me I only played for 2.5 hours (is that per session? I'm more inclined to trust the steam timer)
Is that the end of act 1? There wasn't a lot to it.
...
Onto Broken Age Part 2. Spoilers for part 1, obviously.
You can save on the character selection screen, and reloading the game restarts the unskippable meeting cutscene. Actually, the first time I reloaded it dropped me right back before all the annoying minigames, but that may have been my error.
On that note, I have absolutely no idea what the girl is doing in that cutscene. *Trying* to run into the ship? Trying to punch the boy and stumbling past in the most unnatural way ever?
I would *not* have expected the computer parents to be actual people. That’s… odd.
I suppose Shay and the other spaceman being the same guy via time travel was a popular fan theory, but I’m not sure why the *characters* are jumping to that conclusion, rather than “other spaceman”. Also, they’re not actually dressed the same way, despite claiming to be.
Ah. Ok. The whole creepy wolf guy as a subversive operator encouraging the ship to act as a monster actually kinda comes together now.
So the whole “your parents are actual humans pretending to be computers” is just completely brushed aside. As is what the hell they thought they were doing. Welp.
Ok, *now* the hipster lumberjack/metalworker thing is belabored.
I worried so much about the snake back in the first part, and it turns out It wasn’t blocking the way to anything at all.
Instead of staying with one character for the duration, let’s switch to the girl for a while.
The very first thing that happens (besides finally getting a new screen to explore after all the recycled stuff) is when you think the creepy wolf is trying to kidnap her, but it’s really just the homicidal sentient knife (makes sense in context). That’s pretty good.
The next thing that happens is a trial and error puzzle about connecting six pipes together. Weeeeelp.
Once you do get the correct pipe connection - the one that pops a panel in the middle of a wall - in no way indicates that *this* is the correct solution, rather than another panel. Also, you can stand on the panel, which is an absolute time-wasting red herring, since that does nothing at all to solve the puzzle. Fun.
And when you do get the puzzle right, your prize is the chance to connect MORE pipes. And the interface is so goddamn counter-intuitive I have no idea how to do so.
*Checks video* - so apparently the “leave screen” hotspot on the left overlaps almost entirely with the “disconnect hose” hotspot, so you should use the “leave screen” spot on the other side instead. Well programmed and intuitive.
And now, for a series of timed item grabs. Missed your shot? Best wait another 10-15 seconds
...
The girls exposition talk to her homicidal knife companion is actually fairly natural sounding.
So the wolf room had a bunch of exits in part 1, and now we’re just… zooming in so only one is available.
“I don’t want to cut that”. In general there are far fewer unique interaction responses on the ship, but the knife is the most obvious one, as it’s a constant companion you want to interact with.
The new spaceship puzzles are really really shit. In mostly unrelated news, I spent like three minutes trying to get the decoy from Shay’s bed before I realized the actual puzzle is far dumber.
Blow up the (suddenly introduced) factory producing ship-monsters, and get back to our families. The part where the ships (including this one) have girls / other families inside them is kinda elided.
Stuck on another puzzle (got the bomb, have to distract the former wolf dude to open the hatch and throw it out), so switching to the boy.
The girls family are looking for her and / or are about to overthrow the Maiden’s Feast system, which is pretty cool.
I have literally no idea why you can’t keep climbing Harmony’s ladder. Just… none. The game offers not hints that I can notice. On the same note, apparently that cloud is supposed to have a bow on it everyone keeps referencing?
Oh ffs. I had to click on F’ther while on the ladder. And then go talk Carol, because she’s a knot expert, apparently. Again, to deal with a bow that I can’t see at all, much less see how it’s relevant to the puzzle.
Next, you’re stuck on a puzzle. Literally. You have to describe several sketches as instructions. And every time you mess up because the instructions and sketches don’t seem to correlate, you simply restart, over and over and over until you get it right. Brilliant.
Next… another puzzle you’re stuck on until you get it right. What kind of joke would a tree find funny? Just keep trying until you hit the randomly generated appropriate three line response! Jesus fuck.
The game does still have the occasional funny response, right along side all the “I need to use this object somewhere else”
Someone decided that having a screen shake over and over in a very noticeable way - while you're trying to have conversations, solve a puzzle and decipher instructions - is a great idea.
Gonna copypaste from a FAQ here:
“Repairing the robot is a bit more complicated however, as just having the wire isn't enough. At this point in the game, you are going to need to go to Vella's story and play up to the section where you can view a Family Photo of Shay and his parents in the ship's control room. In the photo are a series of symbols that are a combination. You need to go to Vella's story and make note of these symbols and combination that are shown in order to continue Shay's side of the story. Without it, you won't be able to repair the robot to continue, so be sure to write it down. Once you have the symbol combination, go back into Shay's story and take the robot and wire to Alex's ship. Combine the wire with the robot and then examine it. This will allow you to rewire the back of the robot to different points of the hexagon. One you have placed three wires on the nodules, you can't place any more. The nodules in the Hexipal match up to different symbols similar to what you saw in Shay's family picture. These symbols change from game to game, so there is no single solution to the wire directions.”
Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy (PS, you’ll also have to figure out *how* "the nodules match the symbols”, because the game is only going to tell you in the most obscure way)
No, yeah. That’s the point at which I go “fuck this” and watch the rest in an LP. Shame, because part 1 was really good.
...
(But obviously I haven't)
Shay's response to you drawing out a fucking diagram and solving this shitty shitty puzzle is literally "I have a good feeling about this pattern, but I don't know why". The game is literally taunting you with the lack of sense.
But I find "you have to draw out a diagram to solve this terrible puzzle" a far worse offender than "you have no idea why you're doing this". Any number of adventure games, including (say) Day of the Tentacle did the later.
Just following a walkthrough now, because fuck this shit.
Alt+tabbing seems to be fairly random about pausing or not pausing the game. That means I can’t reliably run a conversation in the background on the one hand, and suddenly have 7 hours added to my playtime on the other.
Vella was actually fairly nice to the other girls when they were oblivious and eager to be sacrificed - now that they’re kinda on her side, she’s suddenly a huge asshole. P.S - New characters are totally right there in the cell, trust us on this one.
Kinda feel as though the big “explain your motivations” rant from the villain should have come *before* we blew up all his shit.
Joy, another hexapal wiring puzzle. Good thing I still have a fucking diagram handy.
Now we have a six part puzzle. Every time you fail, you have to pick up some items, cross half a dozen rooms and fuck Tim Schafer in the eye with a screwdriver. If you fucked up along the way, you still have to go through the full reset pattern allllllllll over again before you can try once more. Fucking Christ.
So the brilliant plan of “let’s blow up both ships for some reason” is a success, I guess? Don’t see the Meriloft girls amongst the fleeing recycled assets, so I guess they burned to death. What a shame.
Terminator thumbs up. Ok, that’s hilarious.
Yep, the Meriloft girls died, because we decided to blow up the two ships for absolutely no reason at all.
And that’s the ending to a 3.5 million dollars adventure game. Welp.
(Edit - seriously, the ending is so goddamn abrupt and lazy and makes absolutely no sense. Wow.)
…
I often harp about how adventure games should get out of the point-and-click “rub every object on every other object” rut and get back to being the forefront of innovation in the games industry they were back in… say, 1985-1995. Part 1 was very much a nostalgic, traditional (charming) point and click adventure. Part 2 is very much not.
The thing is - part 2 is just a puzzle game. Those aren’t new, those aren’t particularly interesting, and those are not a thing Double Fine has any idea how to do.
Back when I was playing through Puzzle Agent 2 I felt fairly smart as I was solving most puzzles, because it was about figuring out the answers in a logical manner.
I felt frustrated with pretty much every puzzle in Broken Age part 2 because they were about following instructions, and the only problem was that the instructions were written by a drooling retard, and served absolutely no logical purpose.
I guess I had enough fun with part 1, but I really should have just youtubed part 2 in its entirety.
I often start these with a bit of bitching about the options menu, but it’s minimalist in all the right ways - all the relevant options are spread out on the same screen, subtitles are front and center, sub-menus when relevant. The PC controls are two mouse buttons and space to skip cutscenes. I approve.
The girl character walks on grass while raising dust clouds - like a racing car or something. Odd.
Good voice acting on everyone involved. Spacebar skips minor repetitive interactions quickly and smoothly. I don’t think you can skip individual lines, which is a mis-step.
The very first (well, second) proper puzzle, and I kinda got stuck. It was basically “click on everything left to right, then right to left” but I found it hella unintuitive.
Good animation quality. Smooth, good-looking, and not constantly departing from the games normal drawing style, which is detailed enough for action scenes.
Are we going to establish a sisterhood of rebellious girls to overthrow the Phagotriarchy(did I get that right?) Because that would kinda rule.
Come to think of it, why did we get to keep our mom’s ceremonial knife while being sacrificed (“we needed it for a puzzle” is not an acceptable answer)
Reiterating what a horrible idea it is not to have a “skip one (1) line of dialog” option in your dialog heavy game. And my perennial wish for every game to include a fast forward button. Sigh.
Apparently a controller gives you the option to highlight hotspots on the screen. A mouse and keyboard do not. Welp.
Cloud eaaaaaaaaaater.
Stuck for the first time, because I’ve neglected to combine some items in my inventory. Fair enough. The whole cloud city sequence is fairly consistent in its internal logic, and I should have figured things out on my own.
So we plunged into a house from cloud city, and walked away no worse for wear. Ok. Not even a haystack or something?
A hipster lumberjack. Oh boy. Well, actually, he’s rather well written. The joke isn’t belabored, which I doubt would be the case in any other adventure game.
A fairly lame fish-themed town, followed by a pretty neat dagon-worshipping valley-girls. Good on the balance.
A lot of jokes that would have faired poorly in less talented hands. A Cthulhu-ish riddle about peaches, for instance. On the other hand, had you actually eaten the peach, tracking all the way back to the clouds without a fast-forward would have been an enormous pain.
There's suddenly a sympathetic spaceman in my generic fantasy world. I wonder if more background will be found in the boys story.
Annnnnnnnnd I think I’m done with the girl portion of the game, 2.5 hours in. The final section, in which you’re targeting a laser at a giant monster is hella boring and finicky. Checked a walkthrough for the second time because the tentacles don't register hits half the time, and I decided they're not targetable.
Didn't find a right spot to note this, but about 90% of all items will get a unique (non-recycled) reply from every NPC. Not necessarily a joke, but generally something interesting. Again, the game is fairly well written.
....
The boy’s story - raised as an overgrown toddler on a starship by mother computer, surrounded by plush toys acting out kindergarten-style rescue scenarios - could easily be fodder for I Have No Mouth or Metal Glen level of creepy shit. Wonder how far the game is actually going to take this.
He’s contacted by a creepy furry thing that wants to take him on “real” missions. I’m kinda disappointed in advance that this probably *isn’t* going to turn into a clusterfuck of fake missions and his degenerating sanity.
Why doesn’t the furry thing have a mouth?
Ok, we “saved” an alien, (by playing a claw machine) but the boy can’t see it. And the ships navigation, programmed to keep the boy safe, is happy to take him to Danger System 5. So this *is* a fake mission deal?
The girls slightly assholish can-do attitude and clear goal are much better than the boy going “ugh, like gag me with a spoon” at everything. (Edit - being restricted to interacting with basically a single environment is also a minus)
Jesus fuck, now that I can explore it, the ship is bloody huge. I hope there isn’t going to be a bunch of backtracking and looking for missing hotspots involved.
So the furry creature isn’t an alien or anything, but literally someone in a fur suit. Creeeeeeeepy.
In a sierra game, going back through the teleport and changing your head size with the helmet on would have been a totally justified death. Shame.
Oh hey, you can’t save while moving. Huh. Not quite as annoying as (say) Shadowrun Returns, but still. Why?
Gary the grabbing robot was probably a completely missable item up until the spacewalk phase, and yet he had so many unique interaction prompts throughout the ship.
Ugh, drifting through space. One of the more fascinating Heinlein stories I read as a teen started that way, and it still gets to me.
So I guess the whole thing wasn’t a double-bind of fake missions? Lame.
Mother computer suddenly can’t grab us to stop us from rushing into danger?
Ugh ugh ugh, drifting through space while a huge Lovecraftian monstrosity floats before you. Pushes so many nightmare buttons. (Oddly enough, the actual monster the girl fights doesn’t. Wonder why)
Holy fucking shit. The manual and auto saves system is batshit retarded. If you save manually and don’t allow the game to overwrite the save slot with future saves (an option only available when you load the game) the game just stops autosaving entirely. What. The. Fucking. Shit. I just lost an hour worth of gameplay because of this. Would have made me quit another game. (Ok, more like 10 minutes given that I already knew what to do and skipped everything, but still)
So. The ending. Was… quite the surprise. At the moment, I have absolutely no idea what the shit is happening.
The manual save is still telling me I only played for 2.5 hours (is that per session? I'm more inclined to trust the steam timer)
Is that the end of act 1? There wasn't a lot to it.
...
Onto Broken Age Part 2. Spoilers for part 1, obviously.
You can save on the character selection screen, and reloading the game restarts the unskippable meeting cutscene. Actually, the first time I reloaded it dropped me right back before all the annoying minigames, but that may have been my error.
On that note, I have absolutely no idea what the girl is doing in that cutscene. *Trying* to run into the ship? Trying to punch the boy and stumbling past in the most unnatural way ever?
I would *not* have expected the computer parents to be actual people. That’s… odd.
I suppose Shay and the other spaceman being the same guy via time travel was a popular fan theory, but I’m not sure why the *characters* are jumping to that conclusion, rather than “other spaceman”. Also, they’re not actually dressed the same way, despite claiming to be.
Ah. Ok. The whole creepy wolf guy as a subversive operator encouraging the ship to act as a monster actually kinda comes together now.
So the whole “your parents are actual humans pretending to be computers” is just completely brushed aside. As is what the hell they thought they were doing. Welp.
Ok, *now* the hipster lumberjack/metalworker thing is belabored.
I worried so much about the snake back in the first part, and it turns out It wasn’t blocking the way to anything at all.
Instead of staying with one character for the duration, let’s switch to the girl for a while.
The very first thing that happens (besides finally getting a new screen to explore after all the recycled stuff) is when you think the creepy wolf is trying to kidnap her, but it’s really just the homicidal sentient knife (makes sense in context). That’s pretty good.
The next thing that happens is a trial and error puzzle about connecting six pipes together. Weeeeelp.
Once you do get the correct pipe connection - the one that pops a panel in the middle of a wall - in no way indicates that *this* is the correct solution, rather than another panel. Also, you can stand on the panel, which is an absolute time-wasting red herring, since that does nothing at all to solve the puzzle. Fun.
And when you do get the puzzle right, your prize is the chance to connect MORE pipes. And the interface is so goddamn counter-intuitive I have no idea how to do so.
*Checks video* - so apparently the “leave screen” hotspot on the left overlaps almost entirely with the “disconnect hose” hotspot, so you should use the “leave screen” spot on the other side instead. Well programmed and intuitive.
And now, for a series of timed item grabs. Missed your shot? Best wait another 10-15 seconds
...
The girls exposition talk to her homicidal knife companion is actually fairly natural sounding.
So the wolf room had a bunch of exits in part 1, and now we’re just… zooming in so only one is available.
“I don’t want to cut that”. In general there are far fewer unique interaction responses on the ship, but the knife is the most obvious one, as it’s a constant companion you want to interact with.
The new spaceship puzzles are really really shit. In mostly unrelated news, I spent like three minutes trying to get the decoy from Shay’s bed before I realized the actual puzzle is far dumber.
Blow up the (suddenly introduced) factory producing ship-monsters, and get back to our families. The part where the ships (including this one) have girls / other families inside them is kinda elided.
Stuck on another puzzle (got the bomb, have to distract the former wolf dude to open the hatch and throw it out), so switching to the boy.
The girls family are looking for her and / or are about to overthrow the Maiden’s Feast system, which is pretty cool.
I have literally no idea why you can’t keep climbing Harmony’s ladder. Just… none. The game offers not hints that I can notice. On the same note, apparently that cloud is supposed to have a bow on it everyone keeps referencing?
Oh ffs. I had to click on F’ther while on the ladder. And then go talk Carol, because she’s a knot expert, apparently. Again, to deal with a bow that I can’t see at all, much less see how it’s relevant to the puzzle.
Next, you’re stuck on a puzzle. Literally. You have to describe several sketches as instructions. And every time you mess up because the instructions and sketches don’t seem to correlate, you simply restart, over and over and over until you get it right. Brilliant.
Next… another puzzle you’re stuck on until you get it right. What kind of joke would a tree find funny? Just keep trying until you hit the randomly generated appropriate three line response! Jesus fuck.
The game does still have the occasional funny response, right along side all the “I need to use this object somewhere else”
Someone decided that having a screen shake over and over in a very noticeable way - while you're trying to have conversations, solve a puzzle and decipher instructions - is a great idea.
Gonna copypaste from a FAQ here:
“Repairing the robot is a bit more complicated however, as just having the wire isn't enough. At this point in the game, you are going to need to go to Vella's story and play up to the section where you can view a Family Photo of Shay and his parents in the ship's control room. In the photo are a series of symbols that are a combination. You need to go to Vella's story and make note of these symbols and combination that are shown in order to continue Shay's side of the story. Without it, you won't be able to repair the robot to continue, so be sure to write it down. Once you have the symbol combination, go back into Shay's story and take the robot and wire to Alex's ship. Combine the wire with the robot and then examine it. This will allow you to rewire the back of the robot to different points of the hexagon. One you have placed three wires on the nodules, you can't place any more. The nodules in the Hexipal match up to different symbols similar to what you saw in Shay's family picture. These symbols change from game to game, so there is no single solution to the wire directions.”
Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy (PS, you’ll also have to figure out *how* "the nodules match the symbols”, because the game is only going to tell you in the most obscure way)
No, yeah. That’s the point at which I go “fuck this” and watch the rest in an LP. Shame, because part 1 was really good.
...
(But obviously I haven't)
Shay's response to you drawing out a fucking diagram and solving this shitty shitty puzzle is literally "I have a good feeling about this pattern, but I don't know why". The game is literally taunting you with the lack of sense.
But I find "you have to draw out a diagram to solve this terrible puzzle" a far worse offender than "you have no idea why you're doing this". Any number of adventure games, including (say) Day of the Tentacle did the later.
Just following a walkthrough now, because fuck this shit.
Alt+tabbing seems to be fairly random about pausing or not pausing the game. That means I can’t reliably run a conversation in the background on the one hand, and suddenly have 7 hours added to my playtime on the other.
Vella was actually fairly nice to the other girls when they were oblivious and eager to be sacrificed - now that they’re kinda on her side, she’s suddenly a huge asshole. P.S - New characters are totally right there in the cell, trust us on this one.
Kinda feel as though the big “explain your motivations” rant from the villain should have come *before* we blew up all his shit.
Joy, another hexapal wiring puzzle. Good thing I still have a fucking diagram handy.
Now we have a six part puzzle. Every time you fail, you have to pick up some items, cross half a dozen rooms and fuck Tim Schafer in the eye with a screwdriver. If you fucked up along the way, you still have to go through the full reset pattern allllllllll over again before you can try once more. Fucking Christ.
So the brilliant plan of “let’s blow up both ships for some reason” is a success, I guess? Don’t see the Meriloft girls amongst the fleeing recycled assets, so I guess they burned to death. What a shame.
Terminator thumbs up. Ok, that’s hilarious.
Yep, the Meriloft girls died, because we decided to blow up the two ships for absolutely no reason at all.
And that’s the ending to a 3.5 million dollars adventure game. Welp.
(Edit - seriously, the ending is so goddamn abrupt and lazy and makes absolutely no sense. Wow.)
…
I often harp about how adventure games should get out of the point-and-click “rub every object on every other object” rut and get back to being the forefront of innovation in the games industry they were back in… say, 1985-1995. Part 1 was very much a nostalgic, traditional (charming) point and click adventure. Part 2 is very much not.
The thing is - part 2 is just a puzzle game. Those aren’t new, those aren’t particularly interesting, and those are not a thing Double Fine has any idea how to do.
Back when I was playing through Puzzle Agent 2 I felt fairly smart as I was solving most puzzles, because it was about figuring out the answers in a logical manner.
I felt frustrated with pretty much every puzzle in Broken Age part 2 because they were about following instructions, and the only problem was that the instructions were written by a drooling retard, and served absolutely no logical purpose.
I guess I had enough fun with part 1, but I really should have just youtubed part 2 in its entirety.