What is your opinion on Broken Age in 2022?

[Toymafia88]

I juat rewatched the Broken Age documentary. On the final episode Tim makes a comment that it will interesting to see what the general opinion on Broken Age will be in 5 years after we forget about the Kickstarter funding stuff and just judge it as game.

 

So I was curious what all of your opinions are 7 years later. Did you love the game? Do you still have issues with it?

 

I replayed the game in lockdown exactly 5 years after the release. Overall, I still find it hard not to think of the game as two halves and compare.

 

I still feel the first half is wonderful and I think they did a great job overall.

 

The second half is where I had some issues (no new locations, puzzles weren't as fun, some story issues)

 

So although my opinion hasn't changed much I'm still grateful to team Red for all their hardwork. 

 

What are your current thoughts?

Edited June 5, 2022 by Toymafia88

[KestrelPi]

I'd like to play it again. I remember the puzzles feeling more satisfying to me in the second half. I remember feeling a bit ambivalent about the ending, and I remember feeling like how they dealt with the question of Shay's parents at the start of the second half was kinda weird and anticlimactic and rang a bit hollow.

 

Still absolutely love the mid game twist and the style, and the soundtrack, and most of the writing, most of the issues I ended up having were about plot stuff that didn't work for me.

[OzzieMonkey]

I liked it, but I've only played it twice and haven't felt compelled to go back to it like I have with the classics or even Thimbleweed Park. I think it's a fine game with some fun dialog and a pretty good story, but I felt like the priority was production value over puzzle design., which I think is a result of the Kickstarter doing far better than anyone thought it would. The game didn't quite come to life for me, something about the limited interaction perhaps? It's definitely the weakest of Tim's games, and I'd honestly prefer to play any of Telltale's pre-Jurassic Park/Walking Dead style games. There are even points where I'd prefer to play Escape from Monkey Island on interactivity alone. I feel like this is coming across a little harsh in terms of the comparisons, so please understand that I love all the games I've just referred to dearly so it's still in good company and a game I would recommend to people wanting to get into adventure games, but it's not representive of what Tim Schafer is truly capable of, imo.

Edited June 7, 2022 by OzzieMonkey

[Vainamoinen]

I didn't go easy on Broken Age, especially on its development process. To me, the whole documentary, dozens of hours, was a superflous and horribly repetitious product of mere vanity and all money that went into it, wasted. On the other hand, I was being a pompous donkey myself back then because I seemed to know in detail where those three million Kickstarter bucks went, my fifteen included, and it certainly wasn't where I thought they should have gone.

 

Eventually, what I got for 15 bucks was far more than my money's worth. The story was just weird enough to force you into thinking in the narrative's reality, but not so weird that you felt alienated. The themes of adolescence and coming of age, of parents lost and parents questioned, were masterfully implemented. The game had a huge narrative twist that I didn't at all see coming, but was completely obvious in retrospect – a mark of great storytelling.

 

I'm a "part one puzzles" guy myself. Those were easy, certainly, but the actions performed for their solution were also very iconic. It's kind of what I'm after in adventure games these days, where the satisfaction in solving a puzzle is not so much how difficult it was and more how peculiar, iconic, and memorable the solution was. This is all consistent with the adventure games of old. It wasn't really all that difficult to put the hamster in the microwave, the pulley on the cable, the bucket of mud on top of the door. But once you did it, you would never forget the solution to the puzzles. Same goes for the humor, which was more endearing than it was drop-dead funny. Dead Eye Dawn and Dead Eye Courtney, I still chuckle about that one.

 

The music was epic a.f. and the only thing that was a bit sad was how short the soundtrack turned out to be eventually.

 

Distribution was fair, varied and thoughtful. Promising a DRM/Steam free version on Kickstarter was setting a trend that brought so many great games to other vending platforms than just the quasi-monopoly. I think that a special thank you to Double Fine and Tim is in order for that one. And a year after I enjoyed the DRM free Humble installer, Double Fine gifted me the GOG version as well. What can I say, 10/10. 🏆

 

Yes, of course there were disappointments. Background and music reuse in episode 2 was brazen. It was clear that Double Fine was running on fumes for the latter part. I hated the mobile optimized "click to do something with that" mechanics and would have preferred a few verbs. There should have been a map to bring you back to key areas of the game. The way too sudden spike in difficulty for the final puzzle complex was a major disappointment. But on the whole, I think these gripes felt far worse back then as they do today. Sudden layoffs in November 2014 were particularly disheartening, as they showed the business to still be very vulnerable. Fans had of course hoped Double Fine would emerge from the DFA as an invigorated, strengthened company.

 

Might have to replay this one soon.

 

Edited June 9, 2022 by Vainamoinen
Rewrote a sentence & restructured a paragraph. It's factually correct now, but will of course not be satisfying to some. I'd rather people wouldn't focus on that little bit though, and stop driving people away from the thread.

[Udvarnoky]

I like Broken Age, but there’s something distancing and drowsy about it that keeps it from being the really captivating experience I associate with my favorite adventure games. It’s beautiful and polished and uncompromised (in that it comes across as exactly the game Tim wanted to make), but as a matter of personal taste I never found it that involving. Its existence is justified by the documentary alone, though.

[TimeGentleman]

22 hours ago, Vainamoinen said:

Key personnel that we've grown fond of in the documentary was fired during development, which I think drove the backers of $6,000,000 up the walls.

 

The kickstarter was $3 million. Who got fired? I don't remember that or any backer ire about it...

[KestrelPi]

 

1 hour ago, TimeGentleman said:

 

The kickstarter was $3 million. Who got fired? I don't remember that or any backer ire about it...

 

I don't recall any 'firings' happening as part of development. What I do recall was a massive torrent of misinformation happening around the announcement that they'd be splitting the game into two parts.

 

It also coincided with the whole g*mergate thing, so what happened was a ton of people trying to manufacture controversy around how Double Fine was managing funds, while the overwhelmingly most common response from backers was that they were happy for DF to take whatever approach they thought was best in order to make the game they wanted to make.

[TimeGentleman]

Yeah, that's my recollection too.

 

Regarding Broken Age in 2022, I haven't replayed it in a long time, perhaps even ever, because I wanted to come to it as fresh as possible without all the Kickstarter/documentary context. I'm really looking forward to replaying it at some point! I'm actually currently doing a playthrough of all the adventure games I own, in release order, but I'm only on Blade Runner at the moment so it'll be a while before I get to it (thankfully I managed to at least get the first three MIs replayed in time for ReMI!). My thoughts at the time, iirc, were that it was great. Looked and sounded gorgeous, fun puzzles, great writing. I would have liked a 'Look At' option, and I did feel like the storytelling at the very end was a tiny bit rushed. I'll be interested to see how/if my opinion changes when playing it in 2022 in the context of other 2014 games and a recent playthrough of thirty years worth of adventure games!

[Vainamoinen]

The exact way I phrased one third of a sentence in an overwhelmingly positive, glowing review of Broken Age was probably incorrect, but fueled not by misinformation, but misrememberings. There were layoffs, in November of 2014, after an unannounced project fell through. And 12 people, for such a small company, yes of course it made waves. I can't find the exact scene in the documentary, but these people were definitely mentioned and missed, Tim was visibly affected and gloomy, and for some reason I remember a lonely christmas tree in a next to empty office. The way google remembers it, no one was fired from the Broken Age project directly. But I and others might be forgiven for thinking that even with a three million buck infusion (sorry for the inflation adjustment earlier 🥸), people could not be ... redistributed.

 

I in no perceivable way question the torrent of misinformation that came from the alt-right precursor née attempted game culture suicide that stupid Adam Baldwin got to christen. I've spent nearly eight years cleaning up the tons of 💩 that these dudes clogged the streets of the internet with. It was a whole lot of it, and it took until this year that I finally started to see parts of the street again. You have to know about three thousand percent more than your average angry Joe about gg proceedings, but if you do, you can actually get some people to reconsider nowadays. Even if it's just the begrudging acknowledgement that "Yeah well, but Totalbiscuit was more of a simple mind anyway."

[TimeGentleman]

I questioned an entire sentence ("Key personnel that we've grown fond of in the documentary was fired during development, which I think drove the backers of $6,000,000 up the walls.") for things that were definitely incorrect - it was $3mil, the staff were laid off not fired - and questionable interpretation (I would take 'drove backers up the wall' to mean it made them angry, not that it made them sad, and this was all framed as disappointment with Broken Age specifically). I agreed with many of your opinions, and disagreed with others, but I didn't see the value in listing that out.

 

Regarding redistributing staff, I don't think that's a reasonable expectation - the $3million was being spent on Broken Age (which was near completion), I don't see how that could suddenly be used to pay 12 other people. Most game dev companies have to lay people off as projects end or get cancelled, it's pretty standard, and DF had a pretty low turnover rate comparatively over the years.

[ThunderPeel2001]

I for one was amazed how carefully the two parts tied together (although the Shay's parent twist didn't work for me). I think releasing the game as two chapters only unfairly hurt its reception. I think Tim might have to wait another 10 years for us all to play it again with fresh eyes.

 

If anyone has the full documentary DVD thing, there's a great video of Ron Gilbert giving his honest and frank assessment of Tim's pitch. The word I remember was "underwhelmed". The man didn't mince his words! It's worth digging out.