#Broken age wire puzzle how to
#Broken age wire puzzle full

I think that Act 1 of Broken Age very cleverly handles its puzzle structure (and therefore – narrative structure, as these things are very interconnected). ‘Oh I’m just gonna walk around with a huge live snake that tried to kill me and will probably do so again.’ The moment when I accidentally stumbled upon the ‘solution’ to that puzzle because I was stuck and just didn’t know what else to do was so frustrating to me, because after playing the game for several hours I didn’t even think about this as being one of the possibilities. Now, I think the obstacle on its own was quite clever. So you need to get some special shoes that spread your weight across a bigger area.Īs you can see, while all this happens in a fantastic world, there’s a sense of physicality to it, and the logic not only makes sense to us, there are characters who can explain to you some of it if you ask them.Ĭompare it to Act 2, where you need to make a giant python a part of your inventory as it’s a solution to a puzzle (and you do so by letting it strangle you until it’s tired and can’t do anything more). But they’re so heavy that you instantly fall through the clouds if you’ve got one of those eggs in the inventory (you can’t die in the game, so you’re taken back up to where you fell from, but the egg is not in your possession anymore). And you need to bring some heavy golden eggs to one location. While in Act 1 the inventory is still essentially a ‘vague limitless place behind the back of the character’, the principles are more grounded to reality, even in fantastic environments.įor example, there’s a town located in the clouds. It doesn’t help that the logic one needs to use in Act 2 is much different than the one that has to be used in Act 1. Broken Age tries to hint that there’s some special vague connection between Shay and Vella in Act 2… but it just doesn’t work because of how jarring these types of puzzles are after playing through Act 1. The big issue with this is not even the fact of such puzzles existing (though the rewiring puzzles in particular are annoying as hell), but that it was introduced in the middle of the game.

#Broken age wire puzzle how to

The biggest culprit of this are all the robot rewiring puzzles (I think there’s about 5 of them?) where one character knows solution to the rewiring or how to rewire a robot in a certain way, but it’s the other person who needs that knowledge to do something. There’s a number of puzzles where to solve something as Shay, you need to find information that only Vella learns/knows, and vice versa. However, in Act 2, after Shay and Vella switch places and environments, this principle gets thrown out the window. Everything is based on character knowledge. In Act 1, you don’t need to switch to the other character to figure out how to get past the obstacle that your currently selected character is facing. Be warned, there will be spoilers!ġ – Puzzles start getting based on player knowledge, not character knowledge. But I do want to discuss what I think are glaring design issues with the game, Act 2 specifically, and why they’re such a big problem. So this post I’m not going to talk about my thoughts on how the character arcs set up in Act 1 weren’t fulfilled, or how Act 2 jumps the shark with a bunch of strange twists or motivations.

I’m so disappointed by Act 2 that I think I’ve spent 3 or 4 days constantly complaining to everyone I know about it.

And… let’s just say, Act 2 is not as good as Act 1, both narrative-wise and gameplay-wise.

#Broken age wire puzzle full

It prompted me to binge the full game from start to finish. That is, until I got recently the final backer reward – the collector’s box for Broken Age. Though, because my save files were somehow lost, when Act 2 was released I didn’t play it. And when Act 1 got released, I was absolutely blown away. Back in the day, I gave some money to its Kickstarter campaign, at the time known just as Double Fine Adventure. I think Broken Age has got to be the game I’m most confused what to think about.