Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars certainly knows how to set a mood. The game opens on a black screen of narration from the main character, setting the scene. Then, a gorgeous 2D animated cutscene follows the flight of a crow through Paris in the Fall, stilling above the brightly coloured awning of a French cafe. Our leading man George Stobbart is sitting there, smiling as the waitress drops off his coffee, not knowing that his vacation is about to get turned on its head.

I already have some experience with Broken Sword, having played the brilliant sequel to Shadow of the Templars some time ago and really enjoying it. So I was pretty excited when I heard about Reforged, a remaster of the original game that attempts to both capture the outstanding mood of the original while updating the graphics and improving the clunky interaction menu that is common in 90s point-and-click.

What do you think of this?

Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars already has a leg up on some of the other older Point and Click titles, as it was originally released on the original PlayStation and as such needed to work with a more simplified interaction system. It does away with the verb menus that you see in Lucasarts or Sierra games and instead narrows down your interaction options to two per object (look or interact) or person (look or talk), alongside your selection of inventory items. Reforged simplifies this again, changing the display for the inventory and dialogue menu, making the objects a lot larger and easier to discern.

Much of the puzzling in Broken Sword is done through dialogue trees instead of your traditional object-on-object puzzle solving. While there are plenty of random objects for George to pick and put in his pockets, most of your time is spent exhausting dialogue trees and tricking random tourists into doing favours for you. It’s a very cool take on the genre and sometimes feels a little bit more cerebral because it’s more about knowing the right thing to ask or say than it is about knowing the right object to use. There’s a lot of abstract thinking required, but it definitely sticks a bit closer to realism than most other point-and-clicks from the time, rarely asking you to do anything completely un-intuitive.

For anyone having trouble though, Reforged does add a wide array of difficulty options. I played on classic mode myself, but there is a story mode available. It offers automatic hints if the game can tell you have been stuck for some time, and also removes interaction points that are no longer relevant to prevent the need to click and re-click on everything in a room because you aren’t sure what to do next. There is also a lot of customisation available for story mode, allowing you to turn off or on certain options to make the experience easier or a little more challenging; like turning off auto-hints, but leaving on the removal of irrelevant interaction points, for example.

Classic mode does still come with an inbuilt hint system that I used once or twice; it gives several hints that grow steadily more transparent as you keep asking for them. This is 100% the best way to do hints in a Point-and-Click, first offering a general direction to follow without spoiling the puzzle itself, and just giving players a little nudge is often enough, I never needed more than two hints for any given puzzle.

Broken Sword – Shadow of the Templars: Reforged Review – A classic adventure

Paris in the Fall

Visually, I unfortunately found Reforged to be a bit of a mixed bag. There has been a great deal of effort put into punching the game up from its original pixelated form, and I am very appreciative that they made the decision to remove almost all of the bad choices made in the ‘09 Directors Cut, but there’s a noticeable inconsistency in quality throughout the game. Backgrounds have all been remastered beautifully, and completely redrawn, as far as I can tell, with soft orange autumn lighting and a wonderful sense of depth that was a little lost in the original pixelated graphics.

Character designs however have lost a bit of their charm in the transition, something to do with the smoothing out of the original crunchy art, specifically in the shading, which makes some characters seem muddy and lacking definition. I found this most noticeable in the central character Nico; while her face and expressions have been greatly improved, the shading on her leather jacket has been done strangely and makes it seem like it’s made out of some sort of awful rubber instead of leather. This sort of thing is seen across almost all of the side characters too, but, understandably, most of the effort went into redrawing the main characters, which is why it’s strange to see Nico get shafted like this.

The animations are still beautifully preserved. I went back to check clips from the original game throughout my playtime to see what had and hadn’t changed, and most of the bespoke animation used for George interacting with objects throughout the world was still the same, though noticeably touched up, which is wonderful. Broken Sword games are quite obviously trying to capture the feeling of a Don Bluth animation and these little, hand-animated touches, are incredibly important in that endeavour.

Cutscenes, however, are where I noticed the most bizarre shifts in quality. I would say that about half of them have been completely reanimated with new, digital animation and the other half have not. The older animations have been touched up using an AI upscaling tool, which is perfectly fine, considering it’s only referencing animation owned by the group remastering the game, but the frequent cuts between new animation and the upscaling are incredibly obvious and jarring. The upscaler doesn’t do a great job with tidying the animation; there are lots of strange colour choices and linework that I caught as upscaling immediately. Most of the more janky animation moments from the original game have been completely reanimated, so it’s obvious the team were careful to choose what would be updated and what wouldn’t, but I just wish they were able to give the whole game the same treatment.

The voice acting from the original has also been cleaned up a little, and a lot of the noise in the background has been cut out, but there is still a sort of, far-away tinny quality to the audio that’s common with 90s audio files. It makes sense that they decided not to re-record the voices, as everyone in the original does a great job and their voices are so integral to the identity of these characters, so given that, the lacking audio quality isn’t a huge deal.

8

Great

Positive:

Modernised Point-and-Click gameplay
Gorgeous backgrounds
Redone animations that look better than ever
Intuitive difficulty options

Negative:

Not all the cutscenes got the reanimation treatment

Despite some small grievances, I do think that Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars Reforged is the best way to play the game. It makes plenty of quality-of-life improvements to the gameplay and even adds a story mode for those daunted by old-fashioned point-and-clicks. The visual nit-picks I have aren’t enough to ruin the experience, and the moments that have been fully updated are beautifully animated and full of character. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go figure out what to do with this dirty tissue I found in the sewer.