XP: Broken Age

Not a whole lot of new things going on at the moment. I just finished playing the game Broken Age, which I found out about through watching Day[9] Mostly Walking YouTube show, which is hosted by a former pro gamer and his game developer friends playing adventure games and making fun of them. Broken Age actually looked like it had an interesting story so I decided to play it myself.

What I played:

 

Broken Age. A game where you play as two protagonists, a young teenage girl and boy, whose stories at first appear to be separate but become linked together. The girl, named Vella, is one of a handful of maidens prepared to be sacrificed to a monster called Mog Chothra in order to ensure the safety of the town. Vella on the other hand wants to defend the village with force rather than through the sacrifice, and risks her life to fight the monster and manages to escape and start her quest to take down Mog Chothra for good.

The boy, Shay, is floating in a spaceship and given "missions" which are actually fake, and set up to keep him busy as the ship searches for a hospitable planet. Shay discovers a stow away who shows him how to break off from the motherly computer AI and do something real; traveling from planet to planet rescuing alien creatures by grabbing them with the boom arm to take them to someplace safe.

The player switches back and forth from one character to the other at will, and there are hints for each puzzle hidden in the other character's storyline, which is interesting but confusing at times. At the end of Act I, there is a huge twist that reveals how the stories are connected. This is the last chance to go and play the game, or at least the first act, before we get into big spoilers.

What I experienced:

The game had really looked promising, and played really well at first. The dialogue in the story was filled with a lighthearted darkish humor, and it seemed to make fun of the common adventure game puzzles. The puzzles felt smooth, and the designers found comedic ways to give hints just as it starts to get frustrating. However after Act I all of that seemed to disappear, with only the draw of wanting to know more about the story keeping me motivated to play.

Even then the story gets ended abruptly without really giving any kind of catharsis. I'll take a look at the stories for each character, but I'm really only going to cover the meaning of Act I because the story dropped in quality after that.

Vella, a strong black female protagonist, was willing to break away from tradition because the means of sacrificing young teenage girls did not justify the ends, keeping the town safe. The girls are part of the town too, and the town should be willing to fight to defend their own. Vella has a strong sense of morality, and throughout her journey provides the motivation for others to follow her into doing the right thing.

In one of the towns we come across Lightbeard, a man who has built a cult like village in the clouds. He preaches that everyone should be as light and unattached to the world as possible. He even goes so far as to have people remove vowels from their names to make them lighter, and they have to give up all their stuff to him. Like any other cult leader, he is actually a fraud and ironically a hoarder.

Then in the seaside town, she meets Curtis, an artist into woodcarving who is a portrayal of the modern day hipster. He only is interested in things that are unique and deep, when actually it's all about looking cool to other people. The other maidens in the seaside town are middle class girls, in that they act kind of snobbish and brag about their dad's providing the best everything for the Maiden's Feast. The fact that they are so spoiled is kind of funny since they are still being sacrificed to a giant monster, just like anyone else.

The planner of the Maidens Feast is all about making connections and ensuring everything goes smoothly so he has the name recognition to run for mayor. Politics as we know, is all about popularity. Then we have the religion of the Dead Eye god, who is really just another "space" traveler who crashed there hundreds of years ago. The technology wowed the people so much they thought he was a god. Religion, it seems, is just people's way of explaining thing when they don't understand the science behind it.

Vella's story overall is do what you think is right, because ultimately you are the one who is going to live with the consequences. Everywhere she goes she is challenging people's perceptions and bringing the truth to light. She showed it was possible to fight Mog Chothra and live, proved Lightbeard was a fraud, and found the truth about the Dead Eye God and then eventually the truth about Mog Chothra, which I will talk about after the other protagonist's story.

Shay's story is all about what is meaningful. He is on a spaceship where everything is provided for him, searching for a habitable planet for the people in his home planet Loruna. The mom computer gets him out of bed, gives him a shower, feeds him, and sets up the "missions" for him to take on. But since it is really only the same 3 missions over and over again with the same happy outcome, he finds it all to be meaningless. There is no real consequence, no real danger. Without the fear of failure, why even bother putting in any effort?

For human beings, the fact that our time is limited by lifespan and some of what we do actually puts our life at risk, means we have to make sure that whatever we are doing is worth the price; that it is meaningful to us. The fact that Shay was so willing to break away from the safe routine just shows how we hunger for meaning. When the ship comes under attack as he is trying to rescue the creatures, he feels happy because while it is a risk, it is for something that he feels is important.

The mom computer tells a story of the sacrifice girl, which sounds a lot like Vella's story. It gives the impression that Vella somehow became the computer system in the future. However, it turns out the mom computer is really his biological mother checking in on him remotely. The game never really explained how exactly she came up with the story since she claims ignorance on the true purpose of the mission.

The true purpose of the mission is the big reveal of Act I, when Vella manages to take down Mog Chothra. She discovers it is really a ship, and Shay comes out of it. He was being fooled into thinking he was rescuing creatures in space, when in reality he was the one collecting the maidens.

What has really been going on is a city called Loruna cut itself off from the rest of the world behind a "plague" dam in order to genetically engineer the population to be pure. But there is a problem with the genetic line that every 14 years they need to harvest genetic material from the "wild," which is the rest of the world that Vella lives in. Loruna tells the families piloting the spaceships that they are searching for a new habitable planet, but on the outside the ship looks like a monster, and they are out to collect the maidens.

The story from there on out is just one big mess, but it was interesting to see how the two interact with each other's environment differently. Shay is more excited to be outside, and yet guilty when he realizes what he was really doing. Vella is constantly looking around the ship with suspicious eyes, never dropping her guard. But overall, the story and the puzzles get more convoluted as the game goes on, with no witty clues to keep us on track like before.

The ending is also very lackluster. Vella blows up the Mog factory, and Shay shows up with the Dead Eye God's spaceship just in time to get in the way. Both ships were on autopilot which could not be manually overridden for some reason, and the last act was finding a way to destroy both the ships and have the occupants escape. A bridge is created across the Plague Dam, and Loruna is re-united with the world. I think the overall meaning is humans cannot be left to determine for themselves what is perfect, and need to be more open and connected with other communities to really grow.

But in the end I didn't care about that meaning because they never explained the story of the sacrifice girl, the puzzles got ridiculous (and I don't mean they were hard, it was the fact that they were just so dumb and unintuitive that it made it hard) even by adventure game standards; and to top it off Shay and Vella never said one word to each other even after it was all over. The ending credits gave an epilogue in the form of pictures, with all the interactable characters getting a frame of what life is like after the fall of the Plague Dam. That "epilogue" I thought was actually pretty good for all the characters, but I still wish we had more of an actual ending that wasn't rushed.

As for the game overall. If you can pick it up for cheap, I'd recommend it for the first act alone. Just make sure not to expect much after that. What games have you guys come across that had a strong beginning or interesting concept but never quite delivered? Let me know in the comments!