Paris in the fall. The last months of the year, at the end of the millennium. The city holds many memories for me: of cafes, of music, of love… and of death.
In the pantheon of classic, Golden Age adventure games, few have managed to retain as strong a grip on me as Broken Sword. More grounded than LucasArts' fare, funnier than Gabriel Knight, less obtuse than the Sierra greats—it stepped into the ring and went up against a horde of PC gaming faves, and it kicked some serious arse.
The first—and best—game in the series has returned today, in the form of Broken Sword: Shadows of the Templars Reforged, but this is not the first time that Broken Sword has tried to engineer a comeback. In 2010, Revolution released the Director's Cut, a remaster with some new bits thrown in. It… wasn't great.
OK, that's not quite fair. It was still, for the most part, a brilliant adventure game, but the additions and tweaks were unnecessary and ruined the flow. For instance, the original's iconic opening—narrated by bumbling American tourist George Stobbart, right before he almost gets blown to smithereens outside a Parisian cafe—gets swapped for a new prologue featuring Nico Collard, George's adventuring buddy and on-and-off-again girlfriend, and it just doesn't work.
Lessons have been learned. Shadow of the Templars Reforged recognises that you can fiddle with a formula too much and risk ruining it. Instead, this new remaster takes a lighter approach, maintaining the original's vision, and pretty much everything else, but with remastered art and audio.
Gone, then, is the Director's Cut's prologue, leaving the original opening completely intact. What changes have been made are tiny and sensible. An elongated drain pipe that makes George's comments about a murderous clown's possible escape route more appropriate is one of the more notable ones. Yes, a drain pipe. So, if you're a Broken Sword vet, this is very much the game you remember.
If it's been a while since you joined George on his first adventure, you probably remember the sumptuous art and likely forgot how pixelated it actually looked. And now that doesn't have to change, because the 4K overhaul makes the backdrops and character art sing.
Revolution employed AI to assist with this, but this is not a case of AI-created art. Instead, Revolution has trained an AI model on its own sprites, using it to interpolate frames in between the hand-drawn ones. So the result is a mix of new hand-drawn art, original sprites that have been elevated by AI, and facial expressions created by human animators.
Remembering disasters like Blade Runner: Enhanced Edition and GTA: The Definitive Edition, where the use of AI created all sorts of weird anomalies, I was keeping an eye out for oddities, but instead I found nothing but improvements, like the tiny background posters outside the cafe, where the images on them are finally identifiable. George has a sort of bemused look on his face most of the time, which doesn't always fit the scene even if it broadly fits George's personality, but otherwise this is an absolutely stunning adventure game.
The audio has also been punched up, though the improvements here are less noticeable. Dialogue still sounds a touch tinny and muffled, but to be clear: it's still much cleaner than the original. This is likely as good as it could possibly get without just re-recording the entire thing, which was understandably too tall an order.
A difficulty system—Story or Classic—rounds out the small number of changes, and while Story mode isn't for me, its inclusion is not unwelcome. Getting fed the answers to conundrums is going to leave you without the joy that comes from solving Broken Sword's sometimes tricky puzzles, but the more gentle nudges in the right direction—the way it stops you from repeating redundant actions or subtly guides you to places where you should absolutely be snooping around—won't.
This is a classic pixel hunting, mess-around-in-your-inventory adventure game where you'll spend a lot of time trying to use one item on another item until you get it right (or figure out the correct approach and avoid all the trial and error nonsense), and while I'm a nostalgic sicko who actually enjoys that kinda thing, the ability to sidestep some bullshit doesn't undermine the adventure.
What we're left with, then, is a wonderful romp full of killer clowns, weirdo cops, ornery goats and an American tourist who can't stop annoying strangers. And while this style of adventure game is no longer zeitgeisty—though absolutely not dead, as evidenced by the fact that a new Broken Sword is on its way—George and Nico's globe-trotting escapades undeniably hold up. And this is the best way to enjoy them.
