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I backed the Double Fine adventure game kickstarter that turned into Broken Age and then stopped paying attention to my backer updates roughly two years ago, so it was a pleasant surprise to me when the first part of the game was prereleased on Wednesday.
It is really delightful. The quirky, hand-painted art is great and the music and the voice acting are top-notch—it was driving me crazy how familiar the guy who plays Shay, one of the protagonists, was, until I finally looked it up and discovered that it was Elijah Wood, hee. (The casting of a protagonist in an adventure game is crucial, since the player is going to end up listening to hours of them finding new ways to refuse to do what the player has proposed with various objects.) I think it was really clever to set it up so you can start playing as Shay or Vella and switch back and forth whenever the whimsy takes you; if you're a bit stuck on a puzzle (and frankly I don't think you should be more than a bit stuck, as all of them are fairly gentle), you can go play as the other character for a bit and by the time you come back to it, your mind is fresh and you realize that there's one door you haven't gone through or whatever. Personally, I can't even say what a relief it is to play a game where I can just click where I want to go instead of awkwardly micromanaging my avatar's progress and orientation through a 3-D space. I am so bad at first person shooters, or in fact first person anythings. SO BAD.
The first half (?) of the game becomes generally available 28 January, with the rest of the game due to appear sometime this year. Allegedly. So you should definitely buy it so you can be as frustrated as I am right now.
It is really delightful. The quirky, hand-painted art is great and the music and the voice acting are top-notch—it was driving me crazy how familiar the guy who plays Shay, one of the protagonists, was, until I finally looked it up and discovered that it was Elijah Wood, hee. (The casting of a protagonist in an adventure game is crucial, since the player is going to end up listening to hours of them finding new ways to refuse to do what the player has proposed with various objects.) I think it was really clever to set it up so you can start playing as Shay or Vella and switch back and forth whenever the whimsy takes you; if you're a bit stuck on a puzzle (and frankly I don't think you should be more than a bit stuck, as all of them are fairly gentle), you can go play as the other character for a bit and by the time you come back to it, your mind is fresh and you realize that there's one door you haven't gone through or whatever. Personally, I can't even say what a relief it is to play a game where I can just click where I want to go instead of awkwardly micromanaging my avatar's progress and orientation through a 3-D space. I am so bad at first person shooters, or in fact first person anythings. SO BAD.
The first half (?) of the game becomes generally available 28 January, with the rest of the game due to appear sometime this year. Allegedly. So you should definitely buy it so you can be as frustrated as I am right now.
