If I'm not mistaken, the first point and click adventure I played was Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars. It was definitely a demo, rather than the full game, and the internet points me towards it being given away with the Official UK PlayStation Magazine in March 1997.
I haven't played it since.
Not because it was a point and click, no. Honest. I thought the demo was awesome. A game that looked like a cartoon - that even moved like one. I hadn't come across that before. Earthworm Jim wasn't in my life until later, for one example that springs to mind.
Anyway, believe it or not, I liked the idea of Broken Sword and what it had to offer, but kids being kids and pocket money being pocket money, I didn't get Broken Sword. It just fell by the wayside as I got easily distracted by whatever came after it.
As life went on, I never saw a reason to go back and actually see what the game was like beyond the conclusion of that demo. I never looked into the sequels - never even knew about most of them - and Broken Sword was left as little more than a memory.
Until, of course, this 1001 list...
Fun Times
Look at that for an intro. Has Paris ever looked so good? Assassins Creed: Unity doesn't count.
Broken Sword starts as a work of art, overwhelming you with colourful characters before taking the peace of normality with an accordion-based, clown-placed explosion. We, as American tourist George Stobbart, are spared on account of the plot and take it upon ourselves to track down a murderer, probing for clues and interviewing the locals for leads.
I'm playing the Director's Cut, itself now closing in on ten years old, and, personally speaking, I made the wrong choice. It looks its age, let's put it that way.
Speaking of looks, however, I have to point out that Broken Sword mostly looked like this. Giant character heads and comic book influenced subtitles are new, and the UI has been updated, but those backdrops are straight out of the original. I'm sure some kind of polishing and touching up has been done to them, but they're so distinctive that you hardly need to.
I can't think of a single game that looks like this. There are detailed settings and wonderfully designed situations throughout gaming, and there are art styles reminiscent of comics and cartoons too, but Broken Sword is something else, and the Director's Cut doesn't do it justice. That's how much I'm in awe of them.
At the end of the day, though, I've got a game to play, not a cartoon to watch.
Gameplay is your standard point and click affair. Your cursor will change depending on what actions you can do, and is mighty helpful in seeing what you can interact with in the first place because gone are the days where something important on screen sticks out like a sore thumb.
The two characters you control, George and French photo-journalist Nicole Collard, each have their own interests to investigate, despite working together to eventually figure out what's going on. Their individual inventories are full of seemingly-useless-but-obviously-needed-for-a-puzzle-solution objects, and dragging them from the window onto the scene is all you need to do to interact with something. If that's a Director's Cut addition, my estimation of it went up a little.
Puzzles come in many forms, from jigsaws to code breaking, and there doesn't (yet) seem to be any harsh fail states. Your murder investigation is as relaxed as the rest of Paris is, despite there being a killer clown on the loose. You've even got time to have to decide where to journey to next.
Bigger map than Unity, that...
 |
| Source // Wikipedia |
Frustrations
Before I played Broken Sword for essentially the first time, I knew just one thing about it, other than what that demo looked like - The Goat Puzzle.
So infamous that it has its own Wikipedia entry, The Goat Puzzle stopped players dead in their tracks, not for its difficulty per se, but for the fact that it is a completely different puzzle to all those that came before it. Broken Sword primes you into solving puzzles in one way, and then springs a Goat upon you that can only be avoided by solving a puzzle that is just a matter of correct timing on your inputs.
I'm going to enjoy that puzzle, but the frustration is simply that I'm not there yet. I'm still in Paris, and life commitments still get in the way. That's out of game life, by the way. I'm sure George is only doing this because his vacation would have sucked otherwise...
I'm also debating whether or not to go through Broken Sword as it was, rather than as it was remade. The Director's Cut looks like Broken Sword, but it also looks off. It's like a really good fan edit. Character portraits don't match the seemingly original character models. Their speech is strangely plastered over their foreheads. The audio sounds like a mix of original and re-recorded lines. It may well have helped to bring new players into the series, but it's a little jarring all the same.
Final Word
One way or another, I am going to make it to that goat puzzle and beyond. I'm hooked. A point and click adventure that hasn't pissed me off to the point of quitting - how about that for a seal of approval? Rubbish, yeah, I know. A milestone of its own, though: Broken Sword introduced the Templars to gaming before Assassins Creed did, and didn't annoy some blogger who thinks he knows what he's waffling on about.
Whatever it is about Broken Sword that has kept me going, I hope it continues. I know nothing of the story, I don't know how a killer clown is related to the Knights Templars, nor do I know if the goat has anything to do with it either.
But I'm going to find out.
Fun Facts
Wanting to be more cinematic but not an interactive movie, creator Charles Cecil used 'conversation icons' - pictures of people or objects - to promote unexpected back and forths and conversation branches between characters, rather than having the player read a selection of sentences then pick the most appropriate.
Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars, developed by Revolution Software, first released in 1996.
Versions played: Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars, PlayStation, 1996, via childhood memory.
Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars - Director's Cut, PC, 2010