Alright. So I've finished Broken Age, act 1. I have to say, individually speaking, all of Codex's criticisms I agree with, but the combined condemnation I find myself puzzled at.
First of all, the length. It took me about 4-5 hours, so I suppose it will be a 8-10 hour game in total. That's short, yes, but I'm not too unhappy with it given the $15 Kickstarter tag. The official price of $25 I feel is a bit much. I also tend to think adventure games don't benefit from larger scope/length like RPGs do, as the gameplay is more limited (puzzles, puzzles, puzzles). In terms of whether the length feels right for this game in particular, indeed it should have been larger - keep the same locations, just add more things to do in each area. But I don't think it's criminally short.
Second of all, the puzzles. There's no getting away from the fact that this is BA's biggest flaw and that it can only be the outcome, reasonably, of two possible factors: (1) a screwed up production process or incompetence; (2) a desire to casualise. Either way, the end result is something that directly contravenes the old school promise. My attitude to all the KS I backed is 'just make a good game, I'm not too hung up on it otherwise', but it is pretty blatant here. The opening scenes for girl and boy are both terrible one-click affairs; at the maiden's feast basically there's not much of a logic to figure things out beforehand, so you try every item on every girl until you get the right one. The boy one is just click X, click Y, click Z. There are some equally bland puzzles later on - the worst culprit is surely SOLVE THE RIDDLE OF YORN, and by then you've learned to just drag and drop every single item in your inventory on them, and lo and behold, you simply give them the fruit you had before. There's a golden opportunity for a complex multi-step puzzle and you basically solve it if you didn't miss the gigantic fruit tree before. I'm an adventure game noob and I don't exactly miss the difficulty in some of the older games, but it's a bit too gormless here.
But I think the good / not-so-bad parts of the game are also considerable:
The art style and graphics I think are actually good. Sure, I prefer Grim Fandango, GK1/2, TLJ, Sanitarium... they had excellent direction. But while the visuals of Monkey Island, King's Quest or Full Throttle are nice, I don't think they're so superior like the first list, and Broken Age, depending on your tastes, can hold its own with them. The pity is that I think it is best with more stylised scenes, like the forest outdoors of the lumberjack's house, instead of the cartoonish cloud land, but the latter are more abundant. The sheer variety of animations has already been mentioned, and even if I wish they didnt' splurge on that so much, it's there and it's nice.
The writing and plot I think is decent, too. In the first hour I was thinking what is this saturday breakfast cartoon bullshit. The problem is related to scope in that if this is a 30 hour game, then that's OK for the beginning, but if it's a 8-10 hour game, far too much % of it is spent in Cartoon Network. There are some little funny moments, but generally the boy path in Act 1 doesn't really get out of that; the biggest disappointment here is the wolf character, who, so far, is the worst character in the entire game, in terms of how much tprominence he has yet how thoroughly uninteresting and unfunny he is. In a setting so devoid of 'actual' characters they really needed him to be a lot better, or have a larger supporting cast - e.g. the 'dad' of the machine disappears after the first 10 minutes. However, I think the girl's path gets better as it keeps going. Cloud land is bit heavy-handed in the guru satire but there's a healthy variety of characters and their approaches to that; the lumberjack guy is well done, and Shellmound is OK too. The 'twist' is pretty obviously foregrounded, but I don't mind, and it does set things up for an interesting second act, which is guaranteed to be less saccharine.
(There are some odd disjunctures in the delivery of the story; too often you're not sure why you're doing what, i.e. you don't know why you need the tree's sap when you ask it for it; why exactly you want to get to the forest below cloud land is sometimes a bit obscure; etc., etc. I think tuluse's hunch is right though, and the Steel Bunting / Sugar Bunting stuff I think is the one genuinely clever moment. I'm hoping the story will step up in Act 2.)
Basically, I feel like if only it had some more puzzles, proper ones at that, then it could be called a very good adventure game. It isn't particularly old school, but I think it has character, and I'm glad it's here. I just wish they cut some of the animations and spent some time thinking of puzzles beyond "hey, we need to cut something, let's give them a knife" level.
