Broken age art style update#

The second half of the game barely contains any new areas either, which is disappointing. There’s little to do in most areas, despite how pretty they are. Shay’s spaceship is understandable, as it’s effectively a prison, but Vella’s fantasy world starts to get tiring to explore rather quickly.

Those settings do feel oddly empty, though. It’s a nice touch and does a great job at making each story feel like its own, and it also makes it when the two switch settings have more impact because of how they react to the new areas. There’s a massive difference between the openness of one and the closed nature of the other, one encouraging exploration and the other escape. His entire world is in a spaceship surrounded by yarn people and hexagon robots, designed by his over-obsessive computer mother. Vella’s world is wacky and bloated with different styles and strange characters (such as a hipster lumberjack), while Shay’s is uniform and suffocating. It also does a lot of great stuff with contrast, as while Vella and Shay’s worlds are both silly and comedic, they have very different flavors. Its clear something has to connect the two very different stories, but the game throws out some red herrings to keep the player off the trail. Some of the twists are easy to see coming, but some really come out of left field and lead to a bonkers conclusion. The story has you switching between the two as their stories play in parallel, and occasionally colliding in surprising ways.īroken Age is a really clever game in many respects. He’s bored of his hum-drum life exploring the cosmos while being babied by his overprotective computer “mom,” and soon meets a strange talking wolf that promises to help him gain purpose by having him save helpless creatures in other galaxies. At the same time, we also play as Shay, a teenage boy in space. Vella chooses to escape her fate as a sacrifice, then decides to destroy the monster once and for all, like her ancestors would have done in their days as warriors. A monster named Mog Chothra has come to her baker village to devour maidens offered to it in sacrifice, as is tradition with Mogs coming every fourteen years beyond the plague dam. First is Vella, a girl living in a fantasy world.

It’s also a bit different from both those categories: It’s Schafer reflecting on his own life and trying to impart something to his audience.īroken Age has you playing as two characters in very different settings. Broken Age is something from the aging father Tim Schafer, who wants to make whimsical little games alongside his black comedies. The bad business decisions hurt the company’s reputation with some, and the resulting game wasn’t the new classic people expected.īut that doesn’t mean Broken Age is bad, mind you.

Broken age art style update#

It did not help that the game was released in two halves, as Double Fine went over budget and instead used profits from selling the first “act” to fund the second (though they were kind enough to make the second act a free update for those who had the first upon its completion). However, because the campaign had no concrete information on what the game could end up being, people went wild with ideas and expectations for the title, so when it finally released in 2014, it was scorned by many. Broken Age was the end result, and this game ended up making crowdfunding a viable option for game developers, both indies and old vets trying to get back into the scene. Ironically, Schafer’s goal was to fund a game development documentary, with the production of a new game as a side part of that larger project. With his name on the likes of Grim Fandango and Day of the Tentacle, people went nuts over the thought of one of the greats returning to his genre of choice, and his $400,000 goal was broken apart by a $3.45 million finish. In February 2012, Tim Schafer launched a kickstarter campaign for a Double Fine adventure title, marking his return to the genre after fourteen years.