Broken Age

Broken Age's Kickstarter campaign was one of the most closely watched in gaming history, raising over $3 million from backers eager to fund Tim Schafer's return to the point-and-click adventure genre. It arrived in two parts, released a year apart, and this review sample makes clear that the game's reputation today is inseparable from that structure: reviewers discuss it almost entirely in terms of Act 1 versus Act 2, and their verdicts line up with striking consistency.

An excellent opening act, described in genuinely glowing terms

The praise for the game's first half is specific and consistent across the sample. "I can sum up part one in one word: Brilliant!" one detailed reviewer writes, describing the setup — Vella, chosen as a human sacrifice to a village-terrorizing monster, and Shay, trapped aboard a spaceship run by a suffocatingly overprotective AI — as genuinely gripping. The hand-painted art and voice cast draw equally strong, specific praise throughout: "The art is gorgeous, the voice talent is sublime and together they give the game true character," one reviewer writes, and multiple reviewers specifically call out the strength of Elijah Wood and Jack Black's performances in elevating already-strong writing.

A consensus finding: Act 2 doesn't live up to the wait

What makes this review sample unusually decisive is how rarely reviewers disagree about what happens next. "While Act 1 was wonderful, I feel like the game just fell apart in Act 2," one widely upvoted review states, adding that "so many details you'd expect to have been finessed over the long wait for Act 2 are just glossed over." Another reviewer, more blunt, calls Act 2 "pathetic," arguing its puzzles "were not puzzles so much as arbitrary things loosely linked and generally only discovered through pure trial and error," predicting correctly that most players would end up relying on a walkthrough. A third reviewer sums up the whole experience with genuine regret: "I really wanted this to be awesome... The first Act of the game was great. Superb. Loved it," before describing a sharp drop in quality from there. This isn't a handful of dissenting voices — it's close to a consensus position across dozens of independently written, detailed reviews, and it's specific enough about exactly what changed (pacing, puzzle logic, narrative polish) to treat as a genuine structural flaw rather than general dissatisfaction with a sequel.

Two protagonists, two very different receptions within the same act

It's worth noting that even the praise for Act 1 isn't perfectly uniform across both playable characters. Several reviewers specifically single out Vella's storyline, set in her sacrifice-bound village, as the stronger and more immediately engaging of the two halves, with at least one reviewer admitting they played through her entire arc before touching Shay's spaceship-bound plotline at all. That's a useful, specific data point for anyone deciding how to approach the game's structure, since the two stories can technically be tackled in either order or interleaved, and reviewer preference for one thread over the other recurs often enough to be worth knowing about going in.

A story that some feel never fully resolves

Beyond the Act 1/Act 2 quality gap, a smaller but recurring complaint concerns the ending itself, with at least one reviewer describing the game as feeling like it's missing an entire third act rather than reaching a satisfying conclusion. That's a more specific critique than simple disappointment with Act 2's puzzles — it's a structural complaint about the story's overall arc, and it's worth factoring in for anyone hoping the ending fully resolves both Vella and Shay's parallel journeys.

What the completion data confirms

Steam's achievement statistics offer a striking, independent confirmation of the Act 1/Act 2 divide reviewers describe so consistently. An achievement tied specifically to completing Act 1 sits at 36.3% of the tracked playerbase — already a steep drop from the earliest story milestones, which sit closer to 40%. Full completion of every achievement in the game drops all the way to 1.2%. While some of that decline reflects the ordinary attrition any long game sees, the size of the gap between finishing Act 1 and engaging fully with everything afterward is consistent with a real, measurable share of players losing momentum exactly where reviewers say the game's quality drops.

A famous, closely documented development story

It's worth noting the wider context around this game's creation, since it's part of why reviewers hold it to such a specific standard. Broken Age's Kickstarter campaign, and its subsequent development, was filmed for a widely watched documentary series that gave backers and the public an unusually transparent look at how a mid-sized studio actually builds a game, including the budget pressures and schedule slippage that led directly to the year-long gap between Act 1 and Act 2. Reviewers with awareness of that history are generally sympathetic to the circumstances behind Act 2's rougher execution, even while still marking the game down for the resulting quality gap.

Where it lands

Broken Age delivers a genuinely excellent opening act, backed by gorgeous art, a strong celebrity voice cast, and writing reviewers describe in specific, glowing terms — and then, by close to consensus agreement across this review sample, fails to sustain that quality through to its conclusion. The specific, widely corroborated criticism of Act 2's puzzle design and narrative pacing is concrete enough to weigh heavily in this recommendation rather than treat as a minor asterisk. As a landmark Kickstarter success story and a genuinely beautiful adventure game, it's still worth playing — just go in prepared for a second half that the game's own audience largely agrees doesn't live up to its start.