Puzzles that should have been straightforward felt frustrating and inane because I needed to re-learn my way around the environments. I know I keep harping on the release gap, but it really does color the entire experience. That sort of ending would be cute if we’d gotten the whole game right away, or even in the span of a few months, but when you’ve been waiting over a year to see these characters interact it ends up being a colossal letdown. Throughout the entire game Shay and Vella don’t say a single word to each other, and the story ends with a silent smile. The game ramps up to a frantic, urgent finale with challenging, time-sensitive puzzles built around a pretty clever mechanic, but then it caps off with a terse final scene that offers very little in the way of closure. It makes sense as the second half of a continuous game, and works well as an escalation of the buildup from the first part, but on its own the episode feels a little exhausting.Ĭonversely, it also feels as though the episode doesn’t go quite big enough to justify the excruciating delay. I was expecting for this episode to start a little slow and ease into things since Shay and Vella have both been cast into strange new places, but from the word go we’re given access to basically the entire play area of the last Act. There is one enjoyable revelation about the Mom and Dad computers from Shay’s ship, but it comes right at the start of the act and doesn’t have much impact as a result.Īside from that expository content, the bulk of Act 2 is devoted to the game’s climax, and as far removed as we are from the launch of Act 1 it feels kind of devoid of necessary context. A large part of the second act involves explaining the exact purpose behind Shay’s baby-proofed space journey and the Maiden’s Feasts of Vella’s world, but aside from some of the particulars most of it is stuff that we’ve already figured out. The problem – and it is sort of a huge problem – is that we’ve had over a year to contemplate every implication of that twist. Act One left off on a solid cliffhanger, marking a perfect midpoint in the stories of Shay and Vella with a spectacular plot twist that threw everything we thought we knew about their worlds into a new light. The only way to enjoy this game is to run through it in one go. Normally I’m pretty gung-ho about spoilers in my reviews of episodic games, but I feel like I shouldn’t divulge too much about the first act of Broken Age. With a year and four months (almost to the day) since Broken Age Act 1 came out, this conclusion has a LOT of anticipation to live up to. It didn’t work for Broken Sword 5, and those episodes were only split by five months. Broken Age represents the worst possible approach – breaking a single story into two installments at an arbitrary halfway point because your team ran out of money.

Kentucky Route Zero proves you can go up to a year between installments if every episode is a masterpiece. Republique shows that you can get away with much less frequent release intervals if you properly break up the stories of your installments and introduce new gameplay elements in each one. Life is Strange does it better than any other game on the market, with short, deeply interwoven episodes released only a few months apart. There are many different ways to deliver episodic content, some less acceptable than others. Kickstarter backers, fans and reviewers alike have been waiting a long time for the second installment of Double Fine’s platform-defining adventure game, and while it’s very good, that wait is ultimately too detrimental to the overall experience. Playing Broken Age Act Two necessitates that you scour memory lane with a fine-toothed comb, trying to recover details from a three hour span of your life that happened over a year ago. Playing Broken Age Act Two is like taking a trip down memory lane.

Broken age art style