Broken Age: Part I, the game that Double Fine released somewhat apologetically for the first part of fulfilling their big Kickstarter dreams, is a pretty spectacular piece of work, doing the adventure genre proud by completely avoiding utter trash puzzles of the making-you-want-to-uninstall-immediately variety in favor of fascinating world-building, spectacular voice acting and sound design overall, and a great mixture of comedy and intrigue. When I finished the first part I almost regretted having checked a walkthrough, as I was having enough fun that spending a little longer exploring the world not entirely sure what to do probably would have been a good time.

But fortunately Adventure Gaming Writ Large then reared its malignantly hideous head in Part II and breathed sewage all over my good mood. Make no mistake, I was still having a good time for the first hour or so. But then I hit a puzzle so confusing that I literally had to check four different walkthroughs in order to try to understand what was going on--and I still did not know after that. Only a random message forum post spelling out the basic building block on which the puzzle was based ever got me into the proper headspace to understand how to proceed. And this is why no matter how many good times I have, I will always knee-jerk say I hate adventure games if someone asks my feelings on them.

But again, back to the positives--lots to love here, and once I got that one specific puzzle figured out I personally found all the other derivative versions of it later in the game to be simple, contrary to many accounts I read suggesting that the later puzzles were even worse. So I have to give Double Fine credit for, in my view, at least keeping the rest of the game's big puzzles in the same realm, rather than inventing another new type of maliciously random solution specifically intended to ruin your day.

Also I had no idea Jack Black was involved and his character ruled. Really the voice acting overall was just so great, as I mentioned--it particularly stands out as I just played Thimbleweed Park, and you can really tell the difference in budget between these two titles in sound quality alone. Certainly not in many other ways, as Thimbleweed Park is the superior game in my mind even if Broken Age palpably shows you exactly where those millions of dollars went.

Amazing fun! 10/10, would play again.