Let me take a moment and first say how much I value Double Fine for their fair repertoire of video games, and I'd love to merit that solely to just Tim Schaffer but I think it's as a whole that they manage to pull together such amazing games like Psychonauts, Stacking, Costume Quest, Brutal Legend, and their most recent title, Broken Age.
Title: Broken Age
Released: 2014-2015
Broken Age was initially started as a Kickstarter project by Double Fine, called the Double Fine Adventure at first. The reason the release date is such a wide form is because Act 1, the first half of the game, was released in 2014. They partitioned the game off for some marketing reason, perhaps to give the backers a taste of what they had put their money towards. While it could really take you a brief amount of time to finish all the first act had provided at the time, the real way to play the game involves going through all of the dialogue options and seeing how the characters interact with one another.
We have Vella Tartine and Shay Volta, two seemingly opposite individuals in two distinctly different locations, separated at the very beginning with a choice to play either one. Vella lies resting beside a tree, enjoying the sun on the day of the Maidens Feast, a ceremony that each village celebrates independently. This celebration is not meant for the maidens taking part, but more for appeasing the beast that is summoned. Mog Chothra, the most recent of a long line of Grand Mogs, makes its way from one village to the next and takes the offered maidens as sacrifices to spare the village. Vella does not feel this is an acceptable means and feels resisted by her family, trying to encourage them and everyone around her to take up arms to defeat the threat. She resigns to her fate, though, since her family is so adamant and happy for her chosen sacrifice. Determined to prove her family's beliefs wrong, she shakes up the entire festival and escapes, seeking another alternative to the sacrifice of maidens every Festival.
Shay dwells within the Bossa Nostra, a spacecraft that he has been in since as far back as he can remember. He is watched under the caring gaze of two programs called Mom and Dad. The normal routines that he has gone through, day in, day out, have started to drag his spirits down. He is disconnected from anyone physically and feels that there is nothing exciting in his life. The only things that seem to help him are his living yarn buddies and the very vocal silverware. In trying to make his life on the spaceship more eventful, Mom has set up several mission protocols for him to run through, but even those have become so predictable and boring to him. So, when he changes up his routine during one of the missions, he comes to meet a suspicious individual that has been living on the ship this entire time. This fateful encounter begins to unravel Shay's normal life on the spaceship.
These are two sides of the same coin, though, as you will start to see it play off of this as the story continues. Shay's boring life on the spaceship gets gradually more exciting and dangerous, while Vella comes one step closer to realizing her wish of destroying Mog Chothra and saving future maidens from being sacrificed. I won't say too much simply for the true enjoyment that can come from playing the game. One thing I want to establish though is the choice of the name.
From simply playing the first act, you can kind of understand a bit of what the inspiration behind the title may come from. Shay and Vella are teenagers and live in broken relationships from their parents (or parental figures in Shay's case). Add this with the two scenario settings that they are both in and it shows a greater rift that forms between them. While Vella's given an exterior and the freedom of the open sky, we see how Shay's confinement to the interior of the spaceship drive their differences, and their similarities, together. But it is when you include the surprises both at the end of the first act and the entirety of the second act that you understand the titular choice and what it means for the characters involved.
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