![]() ![]() Shaolin costumery aside, it’s très difficile to understand the 12+ rating when you witness Stobbart enquire of an old lady what she makes of his tool, a costume shop manager who looks like John Inman his opinion of a dirty tissue, and another pensioner who confuses him for a private detective that “the term you’re looking for is dick”, which neatly segues to her making a “coq au vin” joke.īroken Sword must surely be the result of an obscure alternate universe where a French Agatha Christie was hired to write a Monty Python-themed version of Cluedo. In short, the game manages not to take itself too seriously. It can be OTT though, particularly lines such as ‘the carved elephant was not just any carved elephant – it had been made by my father’.īroken Sword hammers the tropes home with a force greater than the annulled gravity of Bespin Cloud City on Take Your Son to Work Day, but somehow manages to get away with it without feeling tired.Īnother feature of Broken Sword’s approach to comedy is populating the entire French police force with an attack of the Clouseau clones, a human resources decision that effectively necessitates Stobbart’s and Nico’s involvement lest the entire military-industrial complex be brought down by ancient assassins dressed as family-friendly archetypes. The characters can be disarming as well as witty at times, and demonstrate a dry sense of humour that fails some of the more annoying of us. Nico and George provide narration through the game, and their asides make the story a lot more personal and involving to follow. Two other murders have been committed around the world by a snowman and a giant Emperor penguin, and this, of course, is related to the shadowy templar-y organization with a long history of skulking in the shadows and doing what Templars seem to do George Best. A sinister clown (surely malevolence is down on the person specification for those in the children’s party industry?) serves up an alfresco explosion at the restaurant where George Stobbart happens to be dining, bringing Stobbart into the mystery and continuing to serve his addiction. Broken Sword’s sleuthsome twosome start the game hunting the Costume Killer, an international assassin disguised as a mime who was somehow platonically involved with Nico’s father. Ignoring the Machiavellian machinations of the Knights Templar for a moment, Nico’s unusual past possibly goes some way to solving the riddle of her hair, which challenges the Human League’s Phil Oakey for tonsorial inexplicability. The DS remix tacks on introductory sections with the sufficiently Francosteinish Nico Collard, journalist for La Liberté, former convent schoolgirl, and potato-loving art student crusading for justice and the truth about her papa. The original version of Broken Sword gave the world the opportunity to play only as George Stobbart, American tourist and amateur mysteriologist with an MPhil in Nosey Parker Studies. Right from the start there’s a warm, fuzzy genre comfort blanket draped around the story. Indy is name checked, one of the game’s locations is an archaeological dig, and at one point a character quotes “that belongs in a museum”. Indiana Jones is another strong influence, but with fewer Nazis and implications of light bondage. Although Broken Sword antecedes Dan Brown and the Albino of Self-Flagellation, plot similarities are as inescapable as your own eventual mortality. Set in urban Paris, it’s an adventurous adventure game for not being set in either space, space in the future, or the mystical realms of Whatevzonia. Within the first few scenes you’re already in a café. So, temporarily dragging myself away from an ongoing quest through the kingdom of Xbox to become a 100% authentic gee-tar hero, I grabbed my green DS Lite with its 50 pence’s worth of pink, sparkly plastic case deliberately smothered in superhero stickers, and plunged into the mists of time back to an age of text-based chatting with strangers, hand-drawn animation, and inappropriately murderous street performers. The series stood out from other point-and-clicks through its interface, characters and plot, tone, and setting, to the degree that it felt like playing through a mystery novel. Adventure game standards were lifted to a new pinnacle just as they met with their commercial downfall. This was before strange mutations into entertaining polygonal wild goose-chases such as Grim Fandango and the later Monkey Islands, and the eventual rise in popularity of story-led third- and first-person RPGs.Ī fervent PC adventurer from way back, I played Broken Sword: Shadow Of The Templars the first time around, and thoroughly appreciated its charm and attractive Frenchwoman. The game was originally released for the PC in late 1996 during the death-throes of the home computing’s then-popular genre, two-dimensional point’n’click adventures. In a sense, Broken Sword lives up to its name. ![]()
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