I'm having a really hard time deciding whether or not to recommend Broken Age.

On the one hand, I absolutely loved the art style, the soundtrack, the characters and the world. All top notch. The hand-painted art is consistently amazing, even breathtaking at times. The game runs and flows very smoothly with slick cuts between scenes. The ending of Act I left me in awe of what had just happened and hungry for more. Definitely a page-turner of a game.

Yet the game is unfortunately a victim of annoying, unintuitive and, at times, very frustrating "adventure game logic." The puzzles were mostly OK, but a few too many didn't quite work. Trying to use all your items on all environmental points of interest gets old fast. Some puzzles require solutions that aren't mentioned or taught to the player before (easy stuff like combining items, but in a specific and seemingly arbitrary order, and less obvious things that I won't spoil here.

And the difficulty ramps up to 11 really fast near the end. It came out of nowhere, getting in the way of my enjoyment and destroying the pacing and flow of the experience. Lots of repetition if you fail to do exactly what the game expects, and it's not even clear why you're doing things. Is the player just supposed to do something because the game permits it, not because it's an obvious way forward?

Maybe I just had a particularly bad time. I think I'll recommend this game in the end anyway. After all, walkthroughs exist (THANK GOD) to remove some of the frustration. I would never have finished it without looking up a few solutions. Don't be afraid to use one, and you may really like this game, as I did. Just expect some frustrating design, especially if you're not an avid point-and-click adventure game player.

I'm having a really hard time deciding whether or not to recommend [i]Broken Age[/i]. On the one hand, I absolutely loved the art style, the soundtrack, the characters and the world. All top notch. The hand-painted art is consistently amazing, even breathtaking at times. The game runs and flows very smoothly with slick cuts between scenes. The ending of Act I left me in awe of what had just happened and hungry for more. Definitely a page-turner of a game. Yet the game is unfortunately a victim of annoying, unintuitive and, at times, very frustrating "adventure game logic." The puzzles were mostly OK, but a few too many didn't quite work. Trying to use all your items on all environmental points of interest gets old fast. Some puzzles require solutions that aren't mentioned or taught to the player before (easy stuff like [spoiler]combining items, but in a specific and seemingly arbitrary order[/spoiler], and less obvious things that I won't spoil here. And the difficulty ramps up to 11 really fast near the end. It came out of nowhere, getting in the way of my enjoyment and destroying the pacing and flow of the experience. Lots of repetition if you fail to do exactly what the game expects, and it's not even clear why you're doing things. Is the player just supposed to do something because the game permits it, not because it's an obvious way forward? Maybe I just had a particularly bad time. I think I'll recommend this game in the end anyway. After all, walkthroughs exist (THANK GOD) to remove some of the frustration. I would never have finished it without looking up a few solutions. Don't be afraid to use one, and you may really like this game, as I did. Just expect some frustrating design, especially if you're not an avid point-and-click adventure game player.