I am an adventure game virgin. I admit it. No malice left me in this situation. None of my close family were traumatized in the playing of an adventure game. No pets were accidentally injured, no dates ruined, no specific reason. I simply decided adventure games were lima beans and I was a picky eater. It’s unfortunate because history, especially the ’90s, was packed with fantastic adventure games I missed, the most loved of which, Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle, Grim Fandango, and The Secret of Monkey Island were all the brain children of one man: Tim Schafer.
These games have become cult darlings and their legacy helped Schafer’s company Double Fine launch one of the most successful Kickstarters to date. They raised 3 million dollars to make Broken Age. Along with the money came serious public scrutiny and the company voluntarily broadcast the process of production, the budget, the people working on the game, everything — and not everything went to plan. With the adrenaline rush of just having pulled off one of the most dramatic Kickstarter campaigns so far filling their sails, Double Fine admitted to missteps in the scope of Broken Age and decided to release the first half of the game on Steam in order to fund the remainder of development. This decision, and the expanded budgetary needs of the game, angered some people but, instead of rehashing a year’s worth of speculative arguments about the risks of crowdfunding, the messiness of video game budgets, and the aura and responsibility of Kickstarter, let’s start fresh and play this game with new eyes. How does the game itself stand up to all that mounting expectation?
If, like me, you’ve never played this type of game before, the genre works like this: The characters find themselves with no health bars or weapons, just an inventory for things to be picked up throughout the world. Those items can be combined with each other or with places and people to move forward in the game. Need to get water out of that well? Combine your rope and bucket and get to hoisting.