The Humble Store is holding a huge Double Fine sale today. The sale runs through 10 a.m. Pacific (1 p.m. Eastern) tomorrow, Thursday, January 25, and includes games that the studio both developed and published. You can find all the games in question by searching for Double Fine in the store, or by following this link. Here are some of the best games and discounts available:  

•  Everything - $8 at 50 percent off ($10 with the OST)  
•  Psychonauts - $2 at 85% off 
•  Day of the Tentacle Remastered - $5 at 67 percent off 
•  Grim Fandango Remastered - $4 at 75 percent off 
•  Full Throttle Remastered - $10 at 34 percent off
•  Broken Age - $5 at 75 percent off  
•  Escape Goat 2 - $4 at 60 percent off  

Some online stores give us a small cut if you buy something through one of our links. Read our affiliate policy for more info. 

Welcome back to the PC Gamer Q&A. Every Saturday, we ask our panel of PC Gamer writers a question about PC gaming. This week: which game do you regret spending money on? We'd also love to hear your suggestions in the comments. 

Tim Clark: Elder Scrolls: Legends

Unless you're willing to grind like a seaside donkey, CCGs are expensive to stay up to speed with. I generally don't regret spending money on cards, but I do regret quite how much I spent on The Elder Scrolls: Legends. Somewhere along the line I decided I wanted an all-premium (i.e. golden) midrange Sorcerer deck, which meant crafting three copies of each super expensive legendary card, including my favourite: Supereme Atromancer. (I love her partly because she's OP, but also because she looks like British celebrity chef Gizzi Erskine.) I'd almost finished the deck when developer Direwolf Digital swung the nerfbat at fiery queen, and honestly was so annoyed I've hardly played since. 

Samuel Roberts: Harry Potter & The Philosopher's Stone

My one and only lesson about crap tie-ins. Well, this wasn't crap, as such—but I did buy it at full price, so dazzled was I by the idea of Harry Potter being translated into a game for the first time. But this was a tie-in from early '00s EA, which should've rang alarm bells. I had already been reading PC Gamer for three years, and should've known better. 

The Philosopher's Stone isn't too bad—it's just a middling puzzle/platformer that felt like it was aimed at a slightly younger age than I was at the time (13). It translated the Harry Potter universe into a boring, magic boarding school for super posh children who I would've thrown pencils at when I was in year 7 (hang on, that's basically what the books are, isn't it?). I paid full price for this, and quickly regretted that decision. Luckily, my dad sold it for a reasonable sum of money back when that was a thing you could do with your PC games, and we used the cash to buy Medal of Honor: Allied Assault instead.  

I later learned that Fort Frolic mastermind and BioShock 2 director Jordan Thomas worked on this game. I'm sure there's at least one person out there somewhere who prefers collecting a million Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans instead of helping Sander Cohen complete his masterpiece. 

As for Harry Potter, those films and books never got a great tie-in, which is a shame. I bet Lionhead circa Fable 2 would've done a smashing job in making something fun out of that universe. As a deep cut, though, I quite enjoyed the Game Boy Color Harry Potter games, which were like very basic JRPGs with nice pixel art. 

Andy Kelly: The Silver Case

A weird visual novel written and directed by Goichi Suda sounded like precisely my kind of thing. So when this 1999 cult classic was re-released on Steam last year I immediately bought it. But far from the cool, stylish weirdness of Killer7, I found an impenetrable, miserable point-and-click game that was 90% scrolling through text. And not even very good text at that. Part of me thinks it might have gotten better later, but I'll never know, because I refunded it. Oh well.

Wes Fenlon: Dead Space 3

I feel a little guilty speaking ill of Visceral given the studio's recent closure, but Dead Space 3 was a maddeningly bad videogame. I was angry almost the whole time I was playing it, because Dead Space and especially Dead Space 2 were so good. They got the action right; they got the tone right; they kept their sci-fi stories and characters lean enough to be interesting. Dead Space 3's shooting was still excellent, but it made a mess of everything else.

The characters are all constantly angry and constantly idiots, which I guess is a fair thing to be angry about. Every encounter with the main human antagonist is so contrived it has to be on a Hollywood action script template, somewhere. The tone was just a mess. I even bought the DLC, which I believe cost $15 for about two hours of added story, because—and this honestly seemed like a selling point in this stupid-ass game—I heard the final boss was a moon. Somehow, even that was a letdown, probably because Dead Space 3 took itself entirely too seriously. What a waste of a great series, and a perfectly useful moon.

Jody Macgregor: Starship Titanic

Douglas Adams was my favorite author so a game with his name on it was an automatic purchase. Starship Titanic had his name above the title in big letters: he served as a writer and designer and the concept—a spaceship crashes into your house then takes off with you in it, and you spend most of your time on this amazing voyage trying to arrange an upgrade from economy class—is pure Adams. But it's also an adventure game from 1998 so the puzzles are bullshit.

The biggest problem is how bad it is at letting you know what's possible. At one point you have to distract a parrot with a roast chicken. Clicking on the chicken in your inventory then dragging it onto the parrot does nothing. You're supposed to waft it nearby, an action you've never been shown is possible and with no clues leading you to suspect it. The ship has a staff of comically unhelpful robots, who can be talked to by typing directly into a text box then waiting to see which words they're programmed to recognize, and later one of them will help you solve a puzzle if you ask it to. But again, you have no reason to suspect that's an option. At the end of the game you fly the ship via a process so complex you'll just be reading straight off the walkthrough. I have more complaints, like how slow the elevators were at taking you through this gigantic art deco hotel in space (looking back, it's visually the same basic concept as Prey), but the point is I paid 90 Australian dollarydoos and regretted it. Starship Titanic is the reason I started reading reviews before buying games.

Andy Chalk: Will Rock

The only thing I knew about Will Rock was that it had a funny title and looked a lot like Serious Sam, which I absolutely adored. Based on that alone, I bought it the moment I saw it sitting on a shelf. And it was garbage—not even super-bad, really, which at least would have made it memorable. It was just a lazy, half-assed ripoff that tried to parrot Serious Sam and failed, utterly and in every conceivable way. I probably didn't spend even an hour with it before I gave up in disgust. 

Looking back on it now, though, I'm not angry, just... disappointed. Such a great name, such a faceplant of a game. I mean, just look at this mess.

Jarred Walton: Trespasser

Trespasser. Yeah, the old Jurassic Park game that became the laughing stock of the industry. I bought it back at launch. The pre-release hype and acclaim were strong, and it was supposed to be this amazing Jurassic Park experience, continuing from where The Lost World left off. Steven Spielberg himself was involved, which only serves as proof that game design and film have little in common. I guess I was just excited about dinosaurs and ragdoll physics.

For a moment after first launching the game, I actually thought it was going to be so cool. Then the user interface gets in the way, everything bogs down, and it all becomes a horrible mess. Your primary connection with the player character Anne is through her arm, her chest (a tattoo on her breast is used to indicate health), and her super irritating running dialog. "Four shots left. Three... Two, empty." Yes, empty like the game itself.

This was the No Man's Sky of 1998, a game many people were eager to play, that ended up being hailed as the worst game released that year. It had high aspirations, and there were some cool technical achievements, but they were all overshadowed by bugs and interface problems. Never again would I preorder a game. Well, except for backing some Kickstarters like Wasteland 2 and Pillars of Eternity, but those turned out good.

Chris Livingston: Broken Age

There have been many over the years, but I'll put the bullseye on Broken Age. I backed it on Kickstarter back in 2012, and then spent 3 years deleting backer emails that seemed to appear daily in my inbox. Look, maybe all this one-way communication makes people feel like they're "part of the development process" but just send me one email, when it's out. I trust you're making progress: you crowdfunded like $3 million and change. If I wanted this much mail I'd delete my Linkedin filter. 

Then it came out, sort of. I played the first half of the game in 2014. And... I don't know. It was fine? It was okay. I think I was just sort of bored. I didn't really take to it. When the second half came out over a year later I just couldn't summon the interest to even download it. I don't think I even ever checked around to see if people liked it. Did people like it? Email me if you liked it. But only one person email me, or I'll just delete the rest.

But which games do you regret spending money on? Let us know below.

Last week, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds smashed the Steam peak player records. The previous record-holder, Dota 2, while admittedly made by one of the world’s biggest and most powerful games companies, began as a Warcraft mod. These days, we barely blink an eye at the idea that a game can come from nowhere and shake through word-of-mouth, clever concepts, a bit of cool technology like Portal’s… well, portals… or simply by hooking into some reservoir of good feeling, and accomplish more than any marketing budget can dream of. Minecraft is this generation’s Lego. Undertale is one of its most beloved RPGs.

Indeed, the world of indie development is now so important that it’s hard to remember that it’s only really a decade or so old. That’s not to say that there weren’t indie games before then, as we’ll see, but it was only really with the launch of Steam on PC and services like Xbox Live Arcade that the systems were in place to both get games in front of a mainstream audience, and provide the necessary ecosystem for them to quickly and confidently pay for new games.

The massive success of indie games on Steam has of course come with attendant pitfalls. The early access program gave small studios the ability to beta test their games with player numbers they would not otherwise never reach, and gave players the ability to take part in shaping games. However, a lack of guidelines left players and developers with very different expectations as was seen in the reaction to a paid expansion being released for Ark: Survival Evolved while it was still in early access. Steam Greenlight made it easier for indie games to get on Steam but became a popularity contest that was easily gamed, leading Valve to replace it with Steam Direct.

All this is largely taken for granted these days, with the big challenge for modern indie games being to stand out. Simply getting onto Steam back then could set a studio up for life. These days the market is full to bursting, with most new releases disappearing from sight almost at once.

In both cases though, it’s a world away from how the market began.

Back to the start

The exact definition of ‘indie’ has never exactly been cut-and-dry. To some, it’s an aesthetic, best summed up by the classic bedroom coder. To others, it’s a more commercial distinction, of working without a publisher. To others, it’s ultimately about the work, with an indie game standing out more for being not the kind of thing you get from a commercial company, rather than really focusing on who made it. 

There are many definitions to play with, and few hard lines to draw. The poster-children of ’90s shareware, id Software (who you may know courtesy of a little game called Doom), began working under contract for a company called Softdisk, cranking out games like Dangerous Dave in the Haunted Mansion, Hovertank 3D, and Catacomb 3D, before moving on to make games with/for shareware giant Apogee.

In the very early days of gaming, just about everybody was indie to some extent. In 1979 Richard Garriott set out on his path to buying a castle and going into space by selling copies of his first RPG, Akalabeth, in ziploc bags at his local computer store (one of those copies then ended up in the hands of California Pacific, who offered Garriott a publishing deal). Sierra On-Line began in 1980 as just husband and wife team Ken and Roberta Williams, making simple adventure games like Mystery House that nevertheless pushed the boundaries of what people expected from games at the time—like having graphics—before booming to become one of the biggest and most important companies in gaming history.

Companies could emerge from almost anything. Gremlin Interactive began as a computer store called Just Micro, while DMA Design, originally Acme Software, which would make its name with Lemmings and much later become Grand Theft Auto creator Rockstar, began from its founders meeting up at a computer club in Dundee and ultimately signing with Psygnosis. Whole genres were created from a single game, such as Football Manager in 1982.

The speed of all this took many by surprise, with Balance of Power creator Chris Crawford saying in 1984, "We have pretty much passed the period where hobbyists could put together a game that would have commercial prospect. It’s much more difficult to break in, much less stay in. If you want to do a game, do it for fun, but don’t try to do game designs to make any money. The odds are so much against the individual that I would hate to wish that heartbreak on anyone."

The shareware revolution

But of course, people continued. The PC was largely left out of much of it, however, due to the relatively high cost of disks and its general perception of not being a gaming machine. In the UK, the main indie scene in the ’80s was on cassette based 8-bit systems like the ZX Spectrum, with publishers happily accepting almost any old tat, recording it to a tape, sticking it in a box, and selling it for a few pounds at newsagents, game stores, and anywhere else that would take copies. They were cheap, sometimes cheerful, and allowed for endearing weirdness like 1985’s Don’t Buy This—a compilation of the five worst games sent to publisher Firebird.

It would be many years before most indie PC games could get that kind of placement. Instead, there was shareware. The concept dates back to the 1970s, though it was popularized by PC-Write creator Bob Wallace in 1982. Rather than having a central distributor like a regular published game, users were encouraged to copy software and pass it along. If they liked it, they’d then send the creator a check to unlock the full thing or get more of it. 

In the case of Apogee Software, and indeed what became known as the Apogee model, a game might have three parts. The first one would be free, and free to share, the other two commercial and only for registered purchasers to enjoy. (Not that anyone really listened, as the vast, vast numbers of pirated copies of Doom probably shows better than anything.)

The beauty of the system was that anyone could distribute these games, with the rule being that while you weren’t allowed to sell the shareware version, you could charge for materials. That meant games could appear on magazine cover disks and later CDs. They could be on any university server or dial-up BBS or services like Compuserve and AOL. If you wanted a relatively full choice however, you often needed to send off for them. Whole companies were set up to sell just the trial versions, sending out printed catalogues of their stock and charging by the disk. 

By the mid-90s of course the popularity of CD had rendered this relatively pointless, with ‘1000 Games!’ CDs available in supermarkets and bookstores and anywhere else there might be an audience, rarely mentioning the part about them being glorified demos. Much like on Steam today, at this point most smaller games got lost. Still, as a player, it was an almost inexhaustible feast.

As crazy as sending off a check to get a game might seem, it worked. In a few cases, registered shareware games even made the jump to boxed products in stores, though that was relatively rare. Either way, shareware was hardly a license to print money for most, but it supported many a developer throughout the '90s and made others their fortunes. Epic MegaGames began with the text-based RPG ZZT before becoming the company that made Unreal. Duke Nukem began as a very simple 2D side-scroller, notable mostly for oddities like the main character wearing pink and just wanting to save the world so that he could get back to watching Oprah, but nevertheless blossomed into Duke Nukem 3D before publicly wilting into Duke Nukem Forever. 

And there were many more stars too, regularly appearing in new games or simply popular ones that kept showing up, like Skunny the squirrel and his awful platforming (and ultimately karting adventures), Last Half of Darkness, and Hugo’s House of Horrors, much beloved by magazine and compilation editors for its extremely pretty first screen, and never mind that it was all made of clip art and every other room in the game was barely MS Paint-level scribbles.

The alternative industry

Shareware's big draw for players was, inevitably, free games. The downside of the Apogee model and others that erred on the generous side was that a whole episode was often enough—especially as that’s where the developer’s best work tended to be. Compare for instance the deservedly beloved shareware episode of Commander Keen: Goodbye, Galaxy! where you run around a beautiful, varied planet, with the dull space adventure of its commercial sequel. Not every game could be Wolfenstein 3D and promise a fight with Robot Hitler if you paid.

Less cynically though, shareware gave many genres their home. The PC was typically seen as a business machine, with its commercial successes often adventures, RPGs and other slower and more cerebral offerings. There were platformers and beat-em-ups and similar, but they were usually poor conversions from other platforms at best, with few worth taking a risk on. 

Shareware removed that risk factor for customers, while letting developers show off. The original Commander Keen, while simplistic to modern eyes, was proof that the PC could do console-style scrolling, even if it wouldn’t be until 1994’s Jazz Jackrabbit that anyone could seriously claim to be doing convincing 16-bit console-style arcade action and visuals. (Even then it wasn’t a very strong claim, but luckily by this point the PC had Doom and so didn’t care.)

This led to a flurry of games you really couldn’t get elsewhere, or that were in very short supply on the shelves, from vertical shooters like Major Stryker, Raptor, and Tyrian, to fighting games like One Must Fall, to quirky top-down RPGs like God of Thunder, and racing games like Wacky Wheels. It offered a great split. When you wanted a deep, polished experience, you had the commercial game market. For action fun, there was shareware, not least because when we did get big games like Street Fighter II, they tended to stink. Shareware supported the industry through much of the '90s.

The high cost of indie

By the mid-90s though, there was a problem. Commercial games began rapidly outstripping what bedroom teams could do, both in terms of technology and complexity of content. While there were engines available, they were mostly poor quality, with nothing like Unity on the market and the likes of Quake and Unreal costing far too much for anyone but other companies to license.

If you wanted to play with that kind of technology, you were looking at making mods instead. This was the era that gave us the likes of Team Fortress (1996) and Defense of the Ancients (2003), but also where the indie scene became largely forgotten. This wasn't helped by the fact that indie had essentially no place on consoles at all, despite a few nods over the years like Sony’s Yaroze console, a development PlayStation aimed at hobbyists released in 1997. The PC saw its own push towards home development with tools like Blitz Basic/BlitzMAX (2000) and Dark Basic (also 2000), with the goal of inspiring a new generation of bedroom coders. However, despite selling reasonably well, none of them gained much traction or saw many releases.

The indie scene as a whole ceased to be a big player in the market—which isn’t to say that it vanished. Introversion’s Uplink for instance was a big hit in 2001. Jeff Vogel’s Spiderweb Software started releasing old-school RPGs like Exile and Geneforge in 1995. PopCap began in 2000, becoming the giant of casual games like Bejeweled, Peggle, Bookworm Adventures, Plants Vs. Zombies, and Chuzzle—not bad for a company that was originally called ‘Sexy Action Cool’ and planned to make its debut with a strip poker game. 

And of course, there are other notable exceptions, such as Jeff Minter, who never stopped making his psychedelic shooters both for himself and others. However, it wasn’t until 2004 when Steam nailed digital distribution that the market had a chance to explode and offer a real chance of going it alone.

The turning point

Steam wasn’t the first digital distribution system, and at its launch it wasn’t even popular, with Valve forcing it on players for both Half-Life 2 and Counter-Strike. However, it was the first major attempt that nailed the details, like being able to download your games on any computer you owned rather than having them locked to just one, and being able to do so perpetually, rather than simply for a year, as was the case with most of the competition. 

The results spoke for themselves. When Valve was a lot pickier, and being backed by a publisher was a distinct advantage to getting onto the system, any developer who managed to get onto Steam effectively received a license to print money. Farther afield, though games not on Steam were at a distinct disadvantage, the legitimisation of digital distribution as a concept certainly raised most boats.

And with all this came something just as important: the indie game ecosystem. With money to be made and developers flocking to indie for all sorts of reasons (being tired of the big companies, wanting to make a go of an independent project) it became viable to create tools and systems to help make the scene. Game Maker for instance, and Unity and Flash. Today, would-be indie developers have the tools to go head-to-head with even the biggest studios, albeit typically on a smaller scale, as well as explore more cost-effective options like pixel art and procedural 3D, while services like Kickstarter and Fig offer a way of seeking funding without immediately selling out. 

This also opened the definition of ‘indie’ even further, with companies seriously able to consider going it alone, without a publisher. Not everyone could be Double Fine, raising $3.5 million for Broken Age, but many have had huge successes—Pillars of Eternity pulling just under $4 million, the Bard’s Tale getting $1.5 million and in the height of Kickstarter fever, even Leisure Suit Larry creator Al Lowe managing to raise $650,000 for a remake of the first game.

It’s at this point that the word 'indie' really catches on. Again, it’s not that it was never used, but until this point the scene wasn’t big and important enough to warrant a position as basically a shadow industry in its own right. The release of Cave Story in 2004 was where people really started talking in those terms, with Indie Game: The Movie in 2012 cementing this, highlighting three of the most successful titles of the time—Braid, Fez and Super Meat Boy. 

Microsoft embracing the scene via Xbox Live Indie Games played its part, as did their XNA development system, and attempts to make a big deal out of indie launches during its "Indie Game Uprising" events between 2010 and 2012. 

Elsewhere, the IGF (Independent Games Festival) launched in 1999 was also going from strength to strength, drawing more attention to the likes of Darwinia, Monaco and Crayon Physics Deluxe. We also saw more overtly indie friendly portals like itch.io, and the Humble Indie Bundle, offering new marketplaces and ways of selling games—even if many later bundles proved a dead-end.

Perhaps most excitingly, it’s now that we start to see whole genres and styles largely associated with the indie market either flourish or come into existence, not least the ‘walking simulator’—games primarily about exploring a space and a story through environmental detail and voiceover. The first big name here was Dear Esther, a free mod released in 2008 and later remade in 2012, with later examples including Gone Home, Firewatch, and Everyone’s Gone To The Rapture.

There’s also the pixel-art aesthetic of games like VVVVVV, Super Meat Boy, and the original Spelunky, and for many old-school gamers, a return to brutal old-school difficulty. And somehow I doubt we need to say much about Minecraft. (It’s been quite popular, and influential.) Classic point-and-click adventures also saw a resurgence outside of Germany, largely spearheaded by the Adventure Game Studio creation engine and the success of Wadjet Eye Games’ The Blackwell Legacy, Gemini Rue, Technobabylon, and the upcoming Unavowed.

But it’s of course reductive to pick specific genres. The joy of indie games is that as long as the money can be raised somehow, a passionate team can take on more or less whatever they like, free of publisher interference or perceived wisdom, allowing for arty games like Limbo and Bastion (distributed by Warner Bros, but only as a publishing partner), throwbacks to lost genres like Legend of Grimrock, exploratory pieces like The Stanley Parable and The Beginner’s Guide, or completely new concepts like Superhot, where time only moves when you do, and the ferociously complex Kerbal Space Program, where difficulty really is a matter of rocket science.

The downside is that as ever, it’s not enough to simply make a game. An indie title buffeted with word of mouth can sell millions, but far more are doomed to languish largely unplayed and discussed in the depths of Steam’s increasing piles or other services’ far less traveled shelves. The initial gold rush is very much over. Still, plenty of gold remains. It’s impossible to predict what game will be the next Spelunky, the next Minecraft, the next Undertale, or the next Super Meat Boy, but absolutely no risk at all to bet that whatever it is, it’s already on its way.

Humble has a new bundle to celebrate the Day of the Devs event that will shortly be rocking San Francisco, and it's a good'un that is, if you've somehow managed to avoid acquiring copies of Broken Age, Titan Souls, Lumino City and a few other discount-friendly games.

You can pay what you want for copies of the above games, or beat the average for copies of Oxenfree, and Double Fine's Grim Fandango Remastered and Massive Chalice (there are a lot of Double Fine games included here). Meanwhile, an investment of $9 will secure you Day of the Tentacle Remastered, along with a VIP ticket to Day of the Devs, which takes place on November 5.

There's nothing majorly surprising in there, but it's a pretty great bundle if you don't own many, or indeed or any of those games. If that's not enough for you, there's another bundle going that includes Technobabylon, Odallus: The Dark Call and Chroma Squad.

Oh, and there are several Halloween sales ongoing now too. It's all a bit overwhelming, actually, so maybe just fire up Steam and fish out something from your 'backlog' instead.

Every once in awhile a Humble Bundle comes along that's just too good to ignore. Today's launch of the Humble Narrative Bundle, featuring Her Story, Broken Age, 80 Days, and Shadowrun: Hong Kong, definitely feels like one of those times.

We begin, as always, at the pay what you want level (minimum $1 for Steam keys) for the Bafta award-winning Her Story, the cyberpunk adventure Read Only Memories, and Cibele, James' Personal Pick for 2015. Beating the average price, which is currently sitting at under $3.50, will add Broken Age, Inkle's outstanding adventure 80 Days, and the first two parts of Steve Jackson's Sorcery!, also by Inkle and also very good. Finally, for $10 or more, you'll get the Shadowrun: Hong Kong Extended Edition on top of everything else.

The bundle also includes a ten percent coupon for new Humble Monthly subscribers, and charitable donations will go to support Worldreader, a global nonprofit bringing digital books children and their families, empowering them to read, think, and grow in order to improve their lives and their world. Or you can opt to support an entirely different cause if that's your thing.

The Humble Narrative Bundle is live now and runs until June 14.

The second half of Broken Age will be released to the public tomorrow, and Double Fine boss Tim Schafer says that instead of leaping directly into it, it would probably be best if everyone started over from the beginning. Not that you'll have to—saved games from Act One will import into Act Two—but it's been more than a year since the first part came out, and there's a lot going on in the second half that ties back to the first.

"There are just so many hints and story set ups that happen in Act 1 that you need to remember for Act 2 to make sense. Plus, achievements!" Schafer wrote in the latest Kickstarter update. "Anyway, whatevs. You don't have to start over. That's just my recommendation. I'm like that waiter that tells you how to eat your food. No actual legal authority, but you know he's right about the ponzu sauce."

He also said that this isn't "the final word" on the game. "There's another documentary episode coming, and probably more updates. Plus, I think I left my jacket at your house," he continued. "But this is a huge milestone—shipping the game!—so lets raise a spoonful of flavored nutritional paste and toast to Vella and Shay, and to Broken Age—the game that we all made together."

Backers actually have access to the game today. The rest of you can pass the time until tomorrow with our review, which—spoilers ahead—declares that Broken Age is "not a particularly great capital-a Adventure." (It also contains some actual game-related spoilers, so read at your own risk.)

And a year later, Broken Age is finally whole. I don t think many of us were expecting such a long wait for its story to be concluded, for the girl who fought her fate to face the consequences and the boy who wanted an adventure to be given his wish. Talking about the result is somewhat tricky, not just because there s about an equal chance that you re looking to jump in now as to continue the story, but because the nature of a certain key plot reveal at the end of Part 1 makes talking about just about any detail of Part 2 a major spoiler. (I'll avoid the big ones, but a couple are inevitable.)

I say Part 1 and Part 2 , but it s not quite that simple. Broken Age wants to be one adventure game, simply rolling along from start to finish as if the last year never happened. In practice, being split into episodes hasn t been to its favour, both in terms of how over-familiar its world feels despite our limited exposure to it, and how bloated this new instalment feels—like a third of the game has been forcibly over-inflated to be a full half to justify the time taken, rather than simply presented as originally intended.

That may or may not be true, and if it is, I do understand. In another world, I might be whining Wait, this is it? after zipping through. It s still not right though. The first part of Broken Age was in every way a comfortable rather than revolutionary experience, but an interesting one that offered two intriguing, isolated character stories—Vella, a young woman who decides she d rather not be fed to local Cthuloid horror Mog Chothra, and Shay, a young man on a nurserypunk spaceship looking for a real adventure. Despite their simplicity, there was a cleverness in their design—little touches to watch out for, and a shared theme of growing up and finding your own path. All of that gets chucked aside in the second chapter, which answers the big questions early on and then has little to replace them except shopping lists for both characters.

Growing up

The adventure does hold on to both its humour and charm throughout at least; a disarmingly effortless flavour full of imaginative concepts, amusing characters and great lines. The characters rarely become more than puzzle pieces, but are still well worth chatting to and showing off inventory items with to squeeze out all their jokes—particular highlights being an easily offended tree, both characters families, and the pair of druids desperately trying to find something worth worshipping. They ve tried a dead god, now they re trying a tree, and if that doesn t work, they re out of ideas! The resolution of their story is an adorable moment too.

As with so much of the game though, all this is more effective early on, where the whimsy is playing off the dark core plot—that Vella s world is one where maidens are cheerfully sacrificed with fetishistic glee and that Shay is practically tortured with his boring artificial life. In the second half, not only do the big reveals make the mysterious quite mundane (staggeringly so, compared to the inventiveness of the first half, with Shay's not making a whole lot of sense and Vella's ending up exactly what I hoped it wouldn't be), both characters largely just let what happens wash over them. The sense of adventure is then even further ripped from their tales by the majority of the time being spent just retreading the exact same locations—some redecorated a bit, but not by much at all. Without both the intriguing mood to pull the story and their original freshness, it s much harder to ignore the problems under the surface.

Puzzles in particular aren t a high point in the first half, but are largely forgettable. The later ones are markedly worse. Far too many mistake time-wasting for difficulty, with endless traipsing back and forth, dealing with needlessly obstructive characters or mechanics (particularly in the final puzzle, which is tooth-grinding in its over-deliberate fussiness), and developing an obsession with rewiring robots through the most tedious trial and error. We do finally get some where the two worlds interconnect, but only to a point. Rather than giving Shay and Vella a walkie-talkie or something with which they might actually spark the relationship the game somewhat casually assumes they have despite them barely having met, it also opts for a real bugbear of mine—characters solving puzzles by using information they couldn t actually know, like Vella being asked the name of Shay s favourite toy. It just hammers home that while much of Broken Age is fun, it s not a particularly great capital-a Adventure.

Seen in its entirety though, that s not necessarily the dire problem it might sound. The bulk is still amusing, charming and enjoyable, and the faults in this second half would be much less notable as part of a whole—in much the same way that nobody really brings up how bad much of the second half of Grim Fandango and Monkey Island 2 were. (And yes, yes they were). Ultimately, it s a game that cries out for a Director s Cut, to be a comfortable six or so hours instead of a forced eight-to-ten. As a nostalgia trip, a casual adventure, and a world to explore, it s pleasant and very pretty company. It s no modern classic though, so enjoy the ride while it lasts.

Broken Age Act 2 is coming out on April 28 in America, and on April 29 in Europe.

(I was going to do a whole preamble, but I figure you've been waiting long enough for that news.)

Fifteen months after Act 1's release—and thus 15 months after Act 1's cliffhanger—adventure fans will finally get the second chunk of Double Fine's long-awaited adventure.

IGN has a video of the first 12 minutes of Act 2, should that be a thing you want to watch.

For owners of Act 1, Broken Age Act 2 will be free. Well, not free—technically you've already paid for it, y'know? For non-owners, you can secure both parts for the regular price of 19/$25.

Broken Age tells the story of a boy and a girl, both on different worlds and both trapped in their own particular way.

It's been three years since the launch of the Kickstarter campaign for the Double Fine Adventure—the game that would become Broken Age. According to the studio, the result of that campaign is just now reaching its conclusion. Broken Age Act 2 is imminent, and that means an end for both the game and the documentary of its making.

Whatever your opinion of Broken Age's first act (for the record, I loved it), or the looooong wait for Act 2, the documentary—created by Two-Player Productions—is an eye-opening series. It's an honest portrayal of creative development, and a enlightening look at the hurdles and challenges of game creation. It's also being made public.

Currently, there are three episodes available for non-backers to watch:

Additional episodes will be uploaded every Tuesday and Thursday. Alternatively, the full series is available to purchase for an "Early Bird price" of $10. That includes all current episodes at 1080p, plus a bunch of bonus extras when the series has finished.