January 2022 marks a new year and another year of games coming to Xbox Game Pass, and this month brought some incredible titles to the service. One title joining the Game Pass roster was made by award-winning developer Double Fine, the studio behind recent hit Psychonauts 2 and other popular games like Grim Fandango.
Double Fine's game Broken Age is a point-and-click adventure that combines puzzle, mystery, and comedy elements to create an incredible experience, and it came to Game Pass in late December. The hand-animated characters are brought to life by a star-studded cast of voice actors, including Elijah Wood, Jennifer Hale, and Jack Black. Designed by Tim Schafer, a designer for the iconic Monkey Island series, the game is perfect for fans of Double Fine's other work or fans of point-and-click adventure games.
Broken Age's Delightful World
Players step into two roles in Broken Age, playing as Vella Tartine and Shay Volta. Vella is a young woman whose hometown of Sugar Bunting has a morbid tradition: every 14 years, teenage girls are offered up as sacrifices to the horrifying Mog Chothra, a monster that reappears to consume the town's maidens. Offered as a sacrifice, Vella disrupts the ceremony and sets off on a journey to end the violence by finding a way to kill Mog Chothra. Simultaneously, Shay is a young man who lives alone on a spaceship, save for the artificial intelligence that runs the ship, who is charmingly named MOM. Tired of his monotonous life, Shay finds a mysterious stowaway and quickly loses control of his once-mundane situation.
Both Vella and Shay experience a vast array of environments and characters in the game. The protagonists travel from floating cloud cities to ice cream avalanches and encounter adorable sentient robots, the big bad wolf, vomiting trees, and more. The world's hand-animated style and lighthearted writing work together to create a delightful experience that keeps players engaged and laughing while traversing the story. Balancing comedy and a well-written story is often a hard task, but Double Fine succeeds, and Broken Age's moments of seriousness are well-timed and land perfectly, keeping the stakes and emotions high enough for players to want more.
Complex and Satisfying Puzzles
Point-and-click adventure games like Broken Age are often two-dimensional in art style and don't usually host the most complex animations. Instead of focusing on a character throwing a punch on command or dodging bullets, this genre prioritizes storytelling and interesting mechanics to keep players engaged. Broken Age not only hosts hilarious dialogue and detailed storytelling, but its puzzles are genuinely complex. From the start of the game, players are guided in the right direction without being explicitly told what to do.
Vella must use a corset, towel, water bottle, and drumstick in order to wrangle a giant bird. Shay uses a whipped cream gun, a robot named Grabbin' Gary, and a knife to navigate outside his spaceship in a makeshift spacesuit. At every turn, Broken Age encourages players to solve problems in creative ways by using everything around them, and in doing so, produces immense satisfaction when the puzzle is solved.
Broken Age is a great game for just about every demographic. With an ESRB Rating of E10+, it's a perfect fit for the family and younger gamers. Its simple, easy-to-learn controls and accessible mechanics make it perfect for new players, non-gamers, or Dark Souls players looking for a less stressful gaming experience. Gamers who may have been interested in the past but didn't commit to purchasing should take full advantage of a Game Pass subscription now, learning why fans supported Broken Age enough for it to be crowdfunded.
Broken Age is available on PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, Switch, Xbox One, macOS, iOS, Linux, Ouya, and Android.