Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars
Andy Kelly revisits a point-and-click classic.
Broken Sword is a game that knows every great mystery needs a killer premise to hook you in. It begins with an American tourist on vacation in France, sipping coffee outside a Parisian cafe. Then a guy dressed as a clown blows it up. Most people would fly home and try to forget about it, but George Stobbart is not most people: he’s an adventure game protagonist. You know what those guys are like. Vacation be damned, he wants to know who tried to kill him – and he’s going to find out by picking up a bunch of random objects and solving puzzles with them.
Developed by UK studio Revolution Software and released in 1996, Broken Sword is one of the best point-and-click adventure games ever made. It’s beautiful to look at. The puzzles are great. The music is sublime. The characters are memorable. The story is full of twists and turns. And it’s funny. Like, really funny. It’s everything an adventure game should be, and age hasn’t dulled its edge one bit.
Four more Broken Sword games were released after this one, and while they all have their moments, the original remains the best in the series by quite a margin.
Blade runner
The key thing is that George is not a detective; he’s a lawyer with a goofy sense of humour. But nearly being blown up by a terrorist disguised as a clown inspires him to become one, and reveals a deeper side to him. He’s smart, resourceful, and absolutely unshakeable when it comes to the pursuit of justice. He searches the streets (and, more than once, the stinking sewers) of Paris for clues. And as you play, his pockets begin to overflow with objects that may or may not be related to the case. It is a point-and-click adventure game after all.
A plastic red nose. A torn piece of weirdly patterned fabric. An ancient manuscript. A small handful of plaster of Paris. A greasy tissue. Man, he loves showing people that gross tissue. Waving it in front of anyone who’ll listen, saying “What does this tissue mean to you?”, and awaiting the inevitable disgusted response is one of the game’s best running jokes.
Every time I meet a new character, it’s the first thing I do, just to see their reaction. And the game knows it too, throwing in the odd unexpected response, or one that
takes a subtle dig at you for doing it.
As he investigates the bombing, George finds a partner: a newspaper reporter called Nico Collard, whose apartment George visits regularly throughout the game. They have real chemistry, and I love how their relationship grows over the course of the game. It’s one of the best depictions of a friendship forming I’ve seen in a game. Together the pair find themselves tangled up in an ancient conspiracy that runs far deeper than they ever imagined. The killer clown was just the tip of the iceberg, and one small part of a larger, more complex mystery.
One of the best things about Broken Sword’s story is how it’s all based on real history – specifically the legend of the Knights Templar. As George hunts for the clown, he learns about this ancient order of knights and a treasure hoard they supposedly hid before they were dissolved and their last Grand Master was burned at the stake in Paris. Author Dan Brown famously leaned on the same mythology in his wildly popular book The Da Vinci Code, which has a lot in common with Broken Sword – but Revolution did it first, and did it better.
In Broken Sword, the Templars still exist and are trying to take over the world – a plan George and Nico take it upon themselves to stop. It’s a compelling mix of real-world history and the occult, wrapped around an intriguing murder mystery. George’s quest for the truth takes him all over the world, from Paris to a sleepy town in Ireland, a Syrian marketplace, a Spanish village, and a train speeding through the Scottish countryside. It’s a real globetrotting adventure, and the colourful, evocative scenery is constantly changing around you.
Ireland is probably the highlight. George is here following a lead about an archeological dig where a priceless Templar artefact has allegedly been dug up. When he