ThunderPeel2001

Broken Age - Double Fine Adventure!

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Playing so many adventure games has actually created some really weird habits in me: I can actually get really disappointed when I progress faster than I intended.

 

Like for instance, in Broken Age I enjoyed trying to combine inventory items with each other since there was unique dialogue for most potential combinations... ironically, when a random combination would actually work I'd feel sad that I now had two less inventory items to go fishing for dialogue with.

 

I completely agree with this sentiment.  I was disappointed by how simple Broken Age Act 1 was.  The "puzzles" essentially solved themselves.  The most egregious instances of this was in Shay's world.  Typically, I like to explore everything before I start solving puzzles so I don't miss anything.  I was in the process of doing my first pass through all of the rooms before "breaking out", and accidentally "broke out" without realizing what I was doing just by clicking on a random thing on the screen.  It was so disappointing.

 

Act 2, on the other hand, was significantly better.  Yes, there were a couple of bad puzzles and a couple of puzzles that needed better visual cues, but, on the whole, the puzzles were enjoyable and incredibly strong.  It was great to experience the thrill of playing an adventure again.

 

It's not even that I think that the simple, streamlined, Telltale-style adventure is bad.  It's not an all or nothing proposition.  It's fine for there to be cinematic interactive adventures like Telltale's, and it's fine for there to be more traditional puzzle-heavy adventures.  I think the problem here is that both types of adventure fans were interested in Broken Age, and both wanted the game to be made for them.  The result was a schizophrenic game that didn't live up to anyone's expectations.

 

Personally, I think the entire game should have been more like Act 2, not only because that's my bias but also because I feel like it's in the spirit of nostalgia that the Kickstarter was founded on.  I also think it would have been better off as a more focused, modest game that didn't take three years to complete.

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I think this is essentially what killed adventure games - the people who wanted chunky inventory-based puzzles to solve and the people who wanted an interactive story can't actually both be served at the same time.

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You could make it like Broken Sword 3 where there's an interactive story filled with QTEs and all of the puzzles involve moving crates around.

 

Also litter the game with 200 locked doors that you can jiggle the handle of without fail.

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I liked how little the puzzles in Broken Age Act 2 relied on inventory item combinations. Generally a lot of the puzzle meat laid outside of messing with inventory items. Not only is that great for reasons of variety. Inventory puzzling is often easily exploited by just narrowing down all the options. I feel there is a subset of hardcore adventure players who is always disappointed when an adventure game isn't almost pure inventory puzzling, and I think that's because they have to really think then and not exploit the weaknesses of the mechanic. There was someone who seriously considered Act 2 to be a casual affair and called the wiring puzzles a "mini game". Poor guy...

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Adventure game logic question regarding the end of the game:

I've got to know how you figured out you needed to tickle the scarf

 

When I reached that point I had, like Bjorn, figured out that the behaviours would work on both Hexipals. I had the idea that playing harps consists of the player plucking strings and since the scarf is made up of strings of yarn, maybe having the Hexipal jostling the yarn around would make the ship move somehow.

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Honestly I feel like weird adventure game logic is a little more defensible now that internet access is readily available. If there's a puzzle that stops being fun to try and solve and just gets frustrating you can lookup a walkthrough. Machinarium took this to its logical conclusion, and actually had a walkthrough in the game that you could consult in the form of a cool comic book type thing, and I don't know why every adventure game since then hasn't followed suit.

 

I'm going to link again to my rant about hint systems, because I disagree here - adventure games shouldn't rely on internal/external walkthroughs or hint systems, it's just lazy design.

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Unsurprisingly I don't agree. Some people might just enjoy the story, and not really care about solving puzzles in which case they haven't ruined the game for themselves. And what puzzles are obvious, and what puzzles are going to be too difficult to solve is going to vary from person to person. So I just don't see hint systems as lazy design anymore than I see modular difficulty settings as lazy design.

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Adjustable difficulty has been a mainstay in most genres for many years, because what one person considers a horribly designed frustrating mess is an absolute blast for someone else. It's a tricky issue in adventure games, how do you scale logical puzzles? Monkey Island 2 and 3 tried but it felt a bit shit missing bits of the game altogether.

Also, peoples' ability to figure out puzzles varies dramatically and for some it doesn't matter how many contextual hints you throw in there unless you practically spell it out — not even taking into consideration the highly common phenomenon of somebody just completely overlooking an obvious logical solution that's within their grasp to deduce and never, ever figuring it out without help.

I like that Nintendo has started basically giving players an on-demand cheat mode, such as the game playing itself or providing a ridiculously effective power-up. Casual players and children love it. This isn't really mechanically possible with adventure games, but an in-game hint/walkthrough system is and caters perfectly to that very popular demand for 'just get me past this bit'.

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I think the problem with the expectation that the player of an adventure game will turn it off and think about it in their own time is that, especially these days, many players will instead move on to another game. The expectation that players would willingly keep the adventure game in their mind was really more of a hope.

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I like that Nintendo has started basically giving players an on-demand cheat mode, such as the game playing itself or providing a ridiculously effective power-up. Casual players and children love it. This isn't really mechanically possible with adventure games, but an in-game hint/walkthrough system is and caters perfectly to that very popular demand for 'just get me past this bit'.

What games are these?

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What games are these?

 

Some of the recent Zelda games have had statues in your starting location that would play hint videos forp your next objective if you interacted with them, and the recent Marios have all had some variant of an Invincibility Suit that only shows up if you've died a bunch.

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Ah I guess I knew of the Zelda statues, didn't realize Mario was going to that length now. My copy of New Soup for WiiU comes with some DVD telling you how to play all of the levels.

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I would like a button that highlights hotspots on the screen, as my interpretation of visual language on the screen tends to be pretty lousy. I'm not a visual person really. I'd also like a three step hint system. First one is an extremely vague pointer, second is a fairly obvious nudge, third flat out tells you the answer. I have played adventure games with these systems in the past, and have found them a lot more pleasant.

But what I really learned from playing this and The Wolf Among Us back to back, is that I don't think I'm a puzzle person, except in the very broad "whodunnit" sense. I still don't know how I managed to drag myself through 3 seasons of Sam and Max.

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Adjustable difficulty has been a mainstay in most genres for many years, because what one person considers a horribly designed frustrating mess is an absolute blast for someone else. It's a tricky issue in adventure games, how do you scale logical puzzles?

 

I remember Telltale's Sam and Max games (jeez, those were almost a decade ago) had adjustable automatic hints that could be thought of as a difficulty slider. If you were stuck in a particular area, the game would notice and have your character say something to themselves that gives you a hint on the current puzzle, and you had options to adjust both the directness of the hint, and how quickly hints would come. It wasn't perfect, sometimes the most direct hint was cryptic and useless, and sometimes it pretty much handed you the answer, but it easily cleared the low bar of "Best scaling system in an adventure game".

 

Speaking of hint systems, I used to play a lot of flash puzzle games, and something that started popping up within the last five years or so was a trend towards having a walkthrough in the game. On the options menu, there would be an embedded video player, or a link to Youtube that just showed you how to solve each puzzle, the thinking being "Someone's going to make a walkthrough for people who get stuck, I might as well put it right there to save people time looking". I wonder why that's not done more, are designers afraid that making it too easy to peek at the solution will have everyone doing so the moment they get stuck instead of trying harder to figure it out?

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I just finished this and thought it was pretty fantastic.

 

I was really wary of Act 2 as I'd enjoyed the first part - maybe a little bit too easy but I was enjoying just being in this obscenely pretty world, wandering about looking at things and taking in the story and the way some people were going on about it being a significant step up in difficulty put me off. This is my third adventure game ever after Monkey Island 1 and Grim Fandango and I expected it to be such a throwback I might not get it. In the end I only had to look two bits up that I thought were kind of weakly signalled

(how to get the snake to the choking dude and where to use Vella's harp hexipal having rewired it)

and I would've got the second of those eventually if I'd had a little more patience and wasn't so concerned about having to redo the same sequence of events over and over after each failed attempt. Very pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed this overall, I only really backed this because I got caught up in the hype not being an adventure game guy at all and I've greatly disliked every other DoubleFine game I've played. 

 

Now I get to watch the documentary too, bonus! I watched the first few last weekend but I didn't want to see any hint of spoilers so I sacked it until I'd finished or given up. Really looking forward to seeing more of it.

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Just beat the game too and aside from some bummer puzzles I really liked it.

 

The wiring puzzle made me really frustrated though. It felt out of place, as it was so much harder than anything else in the game.

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I played through the whole thing this weekend. I had previously played act 1 by itself, but didn't have my save game, so I didn't mind going back and playing it again.

 

I got stuck three times.

Once on the snake with Shay, twice with Vella in the process of getting Marick out of the room. I was very frustrated with the snake because I knew that I needed the snake to compress down on the not-yet-Mayor since the spoon was telling me to, but I couldn't figure out how to bring the snake to him, or him to the snake. Shay needing to stand there till the snake tires itself out, and Vella needing to mess with the exposed wiring was classic Tim Shafer bullshit where they spend the game teaching you how to solve puzzles, and what not to try and then something works that previously didn't. This was how I felt about all the puzzles in Grim Fandango for which the scythe was the solution. My bf had played and finished it, so when I got mega stuck in those 3 cases I just asked him what screen I needed to be on, and just tried stuff until it worked.

 

For the case of getting Marick out of the room, I was struck by the difficulty of communicating to the player that they did the wrong thing, and now the puzzle is resetting or this is an authored moment where you need to do something else now.  I wasn't sure if him coming back into the room when I was trying to take the star chart was the game resetting the puzzle or if I needed to approach it a different way. At this point I was so angry about being stuck that I just asked which of the two it was, because I wasn't in the mood to walk over and trigger the alarm again if that was going to be a waste of time.

 

I thought it was good overall though. I liked the style of puzzle from Act 1 better than Act 2, I thought the story was only okay. I thought the hexipals were very cute, and the marching band that her followers make was the best.

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The final episode of the documentary

. It's good! Spaff is in it!

 

More importantly, it contains some choice 2001 era Jake Rodkin.

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I didn't notice the Rodkin cameo. As usual the Remo peering through the doorway scene was highly enjoyable though.

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It's not over yet.

I haven't received my large box with 468 DVD documentary set yet.

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Ugh, I'm playing Act 2 right now and I want so badly to like it, because I really enjoyed Act 1, but I'm just finding it unendingly frustrating. Each bit of progress is won by bashing my head against a wall, only to quickly encounter another wall that needs bashing. I can clearly see what my goals are, but have no clue how to accomplish them, so I end up walking in loops, hearing the same dialogue bits over and over again. I like the writing, I like the characters, I like the world - I just hate feeling so goddamn lost all of the time.

 

Broken Age, why do you work so hard to make me not like you?

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EDbUK7N.png

Like two Adonis-es

 

Wow, such an abundance of hair that some was even spared for the chin!

 

 

Ugh, I'm playing Act 2 right now and I want so badly to like it, because I really enjoyed Act 1, but I'm just finding it unendingly frustrating. Each bit of progress is won by bashing my head against a wall, only to quickly encounter another wall that needs bashing. I can clearly see what my goals are, but have no clue how to accomplish them, so I end up walking in loops, hearing the same dialogue bits over and over again. I like the writing, I like the characters, I like the world - I just hate feeling so goddamn lost all of the time.

 

Broken Age, why do you work so hard to make me not like you?

 
I know exactly how you feel, I was the same. I used walkthroughs for a significant part of the second act and I'm glad I did, I doubt i'd ever have finished it otherwise because some of the puzzles are rather obtuse, others are heavy on trial and error and I don't have much time for either. 

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