Broken Age

This is a delightful point-and-click adventure. Its strengths are story, superb art and animation, top-notch voice acting, and lush original music. The puzzles are more of a mixed bag: some really great ones, but also a few that don't make much sense and may prove frustrating with a lot of going back and forth.

But, if you like point-and-click adventures, you are sure to enjoy this one. I recommend it. The tone is family-friendly (with a few sly jokes) and endearing. It may remind you in this respect of Machinarium and Botanicula, though voice acting and plenty of dialog really beef up the production.

So, what's up with all these bizarrely negative reviews? This game had a lot of hype, and was poorly managed along the way (it was originally released in two "acts" and took a total of three years to make), which led to some inflated expectations about and misdirected anger towards the final product. Some people seemed to expect this to be the greatest point-and-click adventure of all time, and when it didn't turn out that way, slammed the game.

Jut ignore all that noise: it's not the best point-and-click adventure of all time, but definitely worth your time and money. The game absolutely deserves a "thumbs up," even if it has frustrating moments.

I also suspect that some of the negative reviews come from people who just don't appreciate the genre: point-and-click adventuring has always been based on 1) thinking logically, and when that fails 2) trying to use every object on every other object, and finally 3) going: d'oh, why didn't I think of that! If you don't enjoy this kind of gameplay, this is not the game that will convert you. It adheres to all the conventions of the genre, just with exceptionally high production values.

Finally, I'd like to thank the developers for supporting Linux!