She resolves to focus all her energy on killing the Mog and, in essence, saving the world. Vella feels tremendous guilt for saving herself-that is, disambiguating from her corrosive family-believing that she has doomed them to destruction. When Vella employs her ingenuity to escape the Mog’s clutches, she follows the path that Miller describes for such children as they enter young adulthood. While Vella had to grow up too fast, Shay was never permitted to grow up at all Aren’t parents supposed to protect their children from the monster, not use them as shields against it? Her parents wave and smile as she is served up on a platter to a disgusting beast, as they believe that the Maiden’s Feast prevents the Mog from destroying their village. (It’s not the kids’ fault for being so advanced parents who rely too heavily on their children for emotional support implicitly encourage precocious development.) Within a dysfunctional family and community system, Vella’s talents are counted against her rather than being nurtured and protected, they are used as justification for her sacrifice. Vella’s predicament is what psychologist Alice Miller dubbed the “drama of the gifted child,” when children of exceptional sensitivity and precocity are tasked with caring for others beyond what is developmentally appropriate, effectively being compelled to parent their parents. She is met with patronization from all but her grandfather, who is dismissed as an out-of-touch old man as readily as Vella is seen as a naive little girl. In her opening scenes, Vella drifts helplessly amongst family members and fellow maidens, asking why everyone doesn’t band together to kill the monster rather than appease it. Vella has been chosen, she is told, because she represents the best qualities of her village, and yet her most compelling asset-a fiercely independent and contrarian mind-is unappreciated from the start. We enter her world on the day that she will be “honored” as a participant in the Maiden’s Feast, an every-fourteen-years sacrifice of adolescent girls to the latest in a line of Great Mogs, horrible floating masses of red eyes and tentacles. One thread follows Vella, a teenage girl from a small village within a larger pastel-infused kingdom. The game is divided into two initially parallel and later intersecting storylines that the player can swap between at will. We are broken, and in our brokenness we break the next in line. We trick them, we sacrifice them for own ends. The message of Broken Age is obscured behind its pleasantries, but undeniable nonetheless: We do not treat our children well. Instead, like any good fairy tale, Broken Age is insidious: its palatable surface belies a darker message, one that sticks with the player after the game is over, needling her like a half-remembered dream that might, in fact, have been a nightmare. Unlike previous adventure games by lead writer/designer Tim Schafer ( Full Throttle, Grim Fandango ), the characters, writing, and puzzles do not leap out at the player in a tour de force. Its gorgeous storybook visuals and playful score whip together like a piece of cotton candy that sweetly dissolves on the tongue and then disappears. We treat our children well.Īt first glance, Broken Age is a light-as-air fairy tale. We are so much more rational, more compassionate, than our barbaric ancestors. This pseudo-knowledge acts as a kind of cultural anxiolytic it soothes us by demonstrating how far we have progressed as a species. We all carry the vague “knowledge” picked up from somewhere-a simplistic textbook from grade school? a program on the Discovery Channel?-that in some unnamed ancient society in some faraway land, innocent children were sacrificed to appease the gods.
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