Adventure Gamers - Forums

Okay, it’s been awhile since this thread was started. But I’ve been playing and replaying games released in 2015, and decided to check out this thread again to see if my theories about the story in Broken Age (before Act 2 released) were in any way accurate.

Well, they weren’t.

Warning: Serious Spoilers Below!

I thought that Shay was being raised without “human” contact because that was somehow part of his training. (I assumed he was being trained as a warrior who would not have normal compassionate feelings toward others.)  It turns out that his parents were so busy running the ship for years on end – and it was so easy for them to simply monitor Shay—that they stopped bothering to spend time with him in person. All that Mom had to do was step outside the control room and hug her son. But she chose not to for years. The only way that I can make sense of this is that the Loruna culture was horribly weakened to the point that it was already devoid of certain ordinary empathic, loving responses (like how good it feels to hug your son). It wasn’t just the elites (Marek, etc.) who had been weakened by inbreeding for centuries, but also the ordinary Lorunians.

Another theory was that previous sacrificed maidens were transformed by the Lorunians into the sentient gadgets and other helpers – Shay’s play companions, the teleporters, the repair robots. But it turns out the Lorunian elite didn’t want the maidens for their brains, but for their genes. Life as a teleporter might actually have been preferable to what really happened to the sacrificial maidens.

I also had trouble wrapping my mind around the Lorunian elite’s reason for sending young boys to choose the maidens. I can see a kind of reasoning when, centuries earlier, the Lorunians would land and interact with the local culture. Maybe young teenage boys do tend to choose the feistiest, healthiest young teenage girls. But by Vella’s time, the maidens weren’t chosen by the boys up in the ships, they were chosen by the communities down below. The boys had no interaction at all with the girls – selecting them was just like playing a computer game. The conscientious boys (like Shay) would try to rescue all the creatures on the screen. Less conscientious boys maybe would leave a few behind. It really meant nothing either way.

The end sequence – where Vella is so focused on ending the Mog rampage that she targets a ship that she must have known was piloted by Alex, even though the ship was in the process of being shot down anyway by the Lorunians – didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. And Shay’s impulse to tie the two ships together by “hugging” is also pretty inexplicable. Of course, it turned out to be the right thing to do, as the failing ships become a bridge. But I can’t imagine that Shay and Vella had this result in mind.

Looking back, apparently it was important that Shay and Vella had final control over their ships, not Alex and Mom. Maybe Shay and Vella had some sort of empathic bond that aided their decisions, something that they weren’t even aware of? And Vella was key, not just to rebelling against the Mogs. If the Lorunians had managed to bring her to their labs and use her genes, it would have strengthened their race considerably. I think Vella was the one they were looking for over all those years.

Something I thought was brilliant was the way Shay and Alex’s Mom’s hobbies were used in the technology in each ship. Knitting vs. music. I loved Alex’s admission that the Marek equivalent on his ship was a sentient cello.