Adventure Gamers - Forums

The puzzles are MUCH harder in part 2. I do hope all of you that wanted harder puzzles are happy.

The magic of part 1 remains - great story and lovable characters, so overall a bargain for what I paid for it.

Thorn - 04 May 2015 06:03 AM

There is just one thing, which made me laugh out loud due to its absurdity, the grandma? She was a half-hybrid or something? Why was she allowed to come back into the city when Shay’s mom had to be destroyed for being in contact with Vella? The grandma had obviously lived with them for years? Was she in some sort of decontaminated space suit?

 

The philosophy behind the Thrush reminded me of eugenics so I didn’t interpret the “disease” as something literal. With that in mind, the whole point of Mog Chothra and needing new genes was probably due to inbreeding. Levina was clearly one of the Thrush who was on a sort of undercover mission to make this happen.

the wiring puzzles, that depends on the other characters knowledge, without them communicating that taints a bit.

The wiring puzzles are easily the very worst puzzles I’ve ever seen in an adventure game.

I barely completed them.

I will play this game again, but I liked the 1st half better than the 2nd. There’s a difference between hard puzzles and insanely esoteric puzzles.

I finally played through both chapters.

Very impressive in very many ways. I can’t imagine building a game under the preposterous pressure that the kickstarter crowd (indeed the whole gaming industry?) put on top of this project. Have expectations ever been that high… ever?

Other than over-using the wiring puzzle and a couple too many fetchquests, I thought the puzzle design overall was really, really good. In my book they could have cut 30% of the puzzles and it would have been a better game though, but I realize a lot of people want “challenge” and indeed prefer to get stuck a little now and then. Difficult crowd to please…

Story-wise it kinda felt like the game was trying to tell too many stories at the same time which sorta left focus drifting. The scope of it all would probably have been better off if cut down a little bit, but overall I think it… sorta worked.

I really like what they did with the camera moving in and out and jumping between different views in conversations and transitions. Really pushing away from traditional one-view-per-room adventure games. It added A LOT of dynamic and made what usually becomes droning dialogue a lot more vivid. Overall the game featured a lot of motion (many parallax layers, particles, small animations) which I believe the genre sorely needs more of.

Another touch I really appreciated was letting the characters keep on talking while walking away from the most recent interaction. It made everything flow a lot nicer than in traditional point n clicks where talks are generally cancelled out by new interactions.

Music was awesome. Voice cast was awesome. Humor worked for me, no laughing out loud but I hadn’t really expected or wished for that either. Dialog overall was OK.

Overall a game that pushed surprisingly many boundaries for profiling itself as a traditional point n click adventure. They could easily have stuck to old-true formulas but instead dared venture into more complex uncharted territory. It’s not surprising that the project ballooned!

It wasn’t another Grim Fandango as I certainly had hoped - but it sure turned out a high quality point n click adventure game.

Still haven’t gotten around to playing part II, but referring to what someone was saying earlier about Tim over promising - there are lots of statements on behalf of the team that might be interpreted that way, but if you go back and look at the original KS pitch (which you should, anyways, because that’s some funny stuff right there) all they said was it was money to either deliver an adventure game or fail miserably, and document everything while they are at it.

Well, the documentary is to me hands-down the best video-game related documentary out there, and Broken Age is nowhere near a crash and burn failure. On the contrary, it has incredbile visuals and sounds, oozes atmosphere, and was obviously fine tuned to match feedback from the backers/buyers. I don’t know, but that sounds like a developer who loves what they do, have an ear to the public and aim for quality. As Tim said in one of the episodes, no one ever remembers games a la “Oh yeah, that game was SO on schedule!” - it is the result that matters. That said, I want to play part 2 soooo baaaad

That said, I want to play part 2 soooo baaaad

I was that way too. However now I wish I would have emailed the developers that part 1 was perfect - don’t change anything…...

I’ll dream of a director’s cut with the wire puzzles REMOVED!

Mikekelly - 11 May 2015 11:29 PM

the wiring puzzles, that depends on the other characters knowledge, without them communicating that taints a bit.

The wiring puzzles are easily the very worst puzzles I’ve ever seen in an adventure game.

I barely completed them.

I will play this game again, but I liked the 1st half better than the 2nd. There’s a difference between hard puzzles and insanely esoteric puzzles.

Really? I thought they were rather fun memory games myself.

I liked those wiring puzzles myself as well. The rope puzzle on the other hand I didn’t.

Finished act 2 yesterday. Unlike many others I didn’t bother replaying act 1, as I could still remember most of the story, and I wasn’t really in the mood to do so.

tomimt - 20 May 2015 06:42 AM

I liked those wiring puzzles myself as well. The rope puzzle on the other hand I didn’t.

I actually enjoyed both, based on the complaints I had read here I feared the rope puzzle, but in reality it was much much easier than expected, and once I had spoken to the right person it only took me two tries. I’m not sure I would call it a well designed puzzle, and they might have been aiming at something humorous with it - and failed, but at least it was easy enough to not be any bother.

The wiring puzzle(s) on the other hand, I found to be excellent. Okay I almost broke my neck on them, and I must have rewired those damn robots something like a thousand times, but that is what you get for ignoring clues like “I think it is almost correct, I just hope that the *beep* doesn’t matter!” , and to make it even worse, there was also another element here that I didn’t realize until it was really too late. But if you fully get all of the mechanics of those puzzles, it is actually easier than you would think.

As a whole I actually think that the last chapter was pretty ingenious, especially the way that you had to switch between Vela and Shay, and time everything so it happens more or less simultaneous.

As for the game as a whole though - Well even though I wouldn’t call it a kids game, then the whole theme of the story is still a bit too juvenile for my taste. It also fells somewhat constructed to me, like Tim had some good basic ideas with two protagonist experiencing some parallel stories that comes together as one story, and then had to force the rest to fit into that formula, regardless of whether or not it did so naturally.