Broken Age is Tim Schafer's hand-painted point-and-click adventure about two teenagers who have never met and whose lives are about to collide. Vella Tartine is being dressed up as a sacrifice to a monster; Shay Volta is being tucked into bed by a spaceship. Funded by the record-setting Double Fine Adventure Kickstarter and voiced by a cast led by Elijah Wood and Masasa Moyo, it is a coming-of-age story told with the wit Double Fine is known for, and this is the complete game, with both acts ready to play from the start.
Two Lives, One Adventure
Vella comes from Sugar Bunting, a village that has learned to keep the peace by offering up its daughters at the Maiden's Feast to a creature called Mog Chothra. Everyone around her treats the honor as a celebration. Vella would rather kill the thing. Shay, meanwhile, lives aboard a ship run by a motherly computer that fills his days with fake rescues and padded-room missions, and he is old enough to know he is being coddled. The first stranger who offers him a real mission is impossible to refuse.
You can switch between the two stories at almost any moment. Stuck on one of Vella's puzzles, jump to Shay for a while and come back with fresh eyes. The two threads are written to echo one another, and by the second act the connection between them turns from theme into mechanics: what you learn in one world is exactly what you need in the other.
A Tim Schafer Story, Start to Finish
Schafer's writing credits run from The Secret of Monkey Island and Day of the Tentacle through Grim Fandango and Psychonauts, and Broken Age is his return to the genre he helped define. The humor is gentle rather than snide: barfing trees, talking spoons, a cloud colony run by a self-help guru, a lumberjack who has sworn off trees. Underneath the jokes is a story about growing up and deciding who gets to tell you what your life is for, and it lands as well for adults as for the family-friendly audience it was built for.
The game was announced in February 2012 as the Double Fine Adventure Kickstarter, which raised over 3.3 million dollars from more than 87,000 backers, at the time the largest crowdfunding total any video game had reached. It was renamed Broken Age before release, and Act 2 completed the story in April 2015. What you play here is that finished whole.
Hand-Painted, Fully Voiced
Every backdrop, character and animation frame was painted by hand, and the art moves between soft storybook pastels for Shay's ship and warmer, rougher textures for Vella's world, so you always know whose story you are in. Peter McConnell, Schafer's longtime composer, wrote the orchestral score. The voice cast is as strong as any in the genre:
- Elijah Wood as Shay
- Wood plays a boy who has been told he is a hero every day of his life and has stopped believing it. His deadpan reading of the ship's daily routines carries a lot of the game's early comedy, and his lead vocal performance was nominated for both a BTVA award and a NAVGTR award.
- Masasa Moyo as Vella
- Moyo gives Vella the stubbornness the story needs: she is polite to the villagers, patient with her family, and completely unwilling to be eaten. The performance keeps Vella likable even when she is the only person in the room who thinks the ritual is insane.
- Jack Black as Harm'ny Lightbeard
- Black plays the beatific leader of Meriloft, a colony perched on the clouds, delivering guru platitudes with the total sincerity that makes them funny. It is one of the game's best-known scenes and a highlight of the first act.
- Jennifer Hale, Wil Wheaton and Pendleton Ward
- Hale voices Mom, the ship's overprotective computer. Wheaton is Curtis, the lumberjack with a conscience, and Adventure Time creator Pendleton Ward plays Gus. David Kaufman's supporting turn earned a NAVGTR nomination of its own.
Puzzles in the Classic Tradition
- Inventory-driven design in the LucasArts mold: pick up what you can, combine the unlikely, and talk to everyone twice. There is no fail state and no timer, so you are free to experiment without penalty.
- Puzzles grow out of the story rather than being bolted onto it. Convincing a tree to vomit sap, escaping a bedroom that will not let you out, and talking a village out of its own traditions are all solved through the characters you meet.
- The second act raises the difficulty and starts trading information across the two worlds, rewarding players who paid attention in the first. Keep your notes handy for the wiring.
- Full controller support is official, so it plays as comfortably on the couch as at a desk.
Recognized Across the Industry
Broken Age won the NAVGTR awards for Game, Original Adventure and Writing in a Comedy, took the Aggie Awards for Best Music and Best Acting, and swept the Aggie Reader's Choice awards for Best Setting, Best Graphic Design and Best Acting. Act 1 was nominated for the BAFTA for Best Story and Act 2 for Best Performer, and the game picked up an Aggie nomination for Best Story as well.
If you grew up on Monkey Island, or you want to hand a genuinely funny, genuinely clever adventure to someone who did not, Broken Age is the one to play. Pick a teenager, pick up the spoon, and see where their stories meet.
