1/27/2024 0 Comments Broken age elijah woodShay’s story was entirely independent of Vella’s, and you could play through to the end of one character’s arc without ever swapping to the other. You’ve got two worlds, so it makes sense (if you’re Double Fine) to force them to interact. The biggest change-and biggest source of frustration-is that some puzzles now rely on you swapping between Shay and Vella for the solution. The second half, with its overreliance on randomness, is tedious. One second before your brain short-circuits.Īs for the puzzles, Double Fine overcorrected from last year. Suffice it to say it involves Shay’s dad.) Ten seconds into his story, we’re treated to a “plot twist” that makes literally zero sense, renders most of his story in Act I implausible if not downright impossible, and stretches suspension-of-disbelief to its absolute limits. (Though the prize for stupidest reveal goes to Shay. That and plodding up and down empty hallways. Act II has nothing but a trope-filled science fiction story you’ve heard a thousand times over, filled with empty characters.Ĭhief offender is Vella, who has zero character development in Act II beyond people saying “She was right the whole time and we should’ve listened.” Most of her story in Act II is actually spent uncovering more information about Shay. Act I seemed like it at least had some well-trod-but-earnest ideas about adolescence. Just soulless automatons that exist to get or give items. It’s an entire cast of robots! No feelings. That lack of meaningful character exploration was honestly the biggest problem with Act I, and if anything it gets worse in Act II. In five minutes, Shay meets more people living on a cloud city than he’s met his entire life. Shay, for that matter, lived inside the confines of that tiny ship his entire life-and yet he doesn’t bat an eye upon seeing the ocean, for instance, or an entire floating city made out of clouds. Vella lived her entire life in a semi-primitive baking society, but seems totally at ease in Shay’s electronics-ridden ship. What’s worse is that neither character seems perplexed by their changed circumstances. It’s not exactly worse, per se, but it’s also not better-and this time there’s no chance an “ Act III” is going to fall from the sky and rectify the game’s many, many issues. I wasn’t amazed by Act I, but I felt like it was a solid foundation for Act II to build on.Īct II squanders that foundation. If you’re going to arbitrarily split your game into two episodes midway through development, you could do worse than that cliffhanger. And then it dropped a hell of an ending on us, revealing that the “monster” Vella had been battling through her whole story was actually the exterior of Shay’s ship.īoom. It didn’t necessarily accomplish them with aplomb-see my complaints about the characters and environments lacking depth-but it did them.
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