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Paris in the fall. The last months of the year, at the end of the millennium. The city brings back many memories for me: of cafes, of music, of love… and of death.
In the pantheon of classic, Golden Age adventure games, few have held such a firm hold on me as Broken Sword. More grounded than LucasArts’ fare, funnier than Gabriel Knight, less crude than the Sierra greats—it stepped into the ring and took on a horde of PC gaming favorites, and it kicked some serious ass.
The first and best game in the series returns today in the form of Broken Sword: Shadows of the Templars Reforged, but this isn’t the first time Broken Sword has attempted a comeback. In 2010, Revolution released the Director’s Cut, a remaster with some new bits and pieces thrown in. It… wasn’t great.
Okay, that’s not entirely fair. It was still, for the most part, a brilliant adventure game, but the additions and tweaks were unnecessary and ruined the flow. For example, the original’s iconic opening – narrated by bumbling American tourist George Stobbart, moments before he’s nearly blown to pieces outside a Parisian café – is swapped out for a new prologue starring Nico Collard, George’s adventuring buddy and on-again, off-again girlfriend, and it just doesn’t work.
Lessons have been learned. Shadow of the Templars Reforged acknowledges that you can tinker with a formula too much and risk ruining it. Instead, this new remaster takes a lighter approach, preserving the vision of the original, and pretty much everything else, but with remastered art and audio.
The Director’s Cut’s prologue is gone, leaving the original opening fully intact. The changes made are small and sensible. One of the most noticeable is an elongated drain pipe that makes George’s comments about a murderous clown’s possible escape route more fitting. Yes, a drain pipe. So if you’re a Broken Sword veteran, this is definitely the game you remember.
If it’s been a while since you joined George on his first adventure, you probably remember the lush art and probably forgot how pixelated it actually looked. Well, that doesn’t have to change now, as the 4K overhaul makes the backgrounds and character art sing.
Revolution has used AI to help with this, but this isn’t a case of AI-created art. Instead, Revolution has trained an AI model on its own sprites, using it to interpolate frames between the hand-drawn ones. So the result is a mix of new hand-drawn art, original sprites enhanced by AI, and facial expressions created by human animators.
Thinking back to disasters like Blade Runner: Enhanced Edition and GTA: The Definitive Edition, where the use of AI created all sorts of strange anomalies, I looked for oddities, but instead found nothing but improvements, like the little background posters outside the cafe, where the images on them are finally recognizable. George wears a kind of bewildered look on his face most of the time, which doesn’t always fit the scene, even if it does roughly fit George’s personality, but otherwise this is an absolutely stunning adventure game.
The audio has also been beefed up, though the improvements here are less noticeable. Dialogue still sounds a little tinny and muffled, but to be clear: it’s still much cleaner than the original. This is probably the best it could be without re-recording the entire thing, which was understandably too big a task.
A difficulty system — either Story or Classic — rounds out the small number of changes, and while Story mode isn’t for me, its addition isn’t an unwelcome one. While having the answers to riddles spoon-fed to you will miss out on the joy that comes from solving Broken Sword’s occasionally tricky puzzles, the gentler nudges — the way it stops you from repeating unnecessary actions or subtly directs you toward places you absolutely should be poking around — won’t.
This is a classic pixel hunting and inventory rummaging adventure game. You’ll spend a lot of time trying to use one item on another until you succeed (or until you figure out the right approach and avoid all the trial and error nonsense). While I’m a nostalgia nut who actually enjoys that sort of thing, the fact that you can bypass some of the nonsense doesn’t take away from the adventure.
What we’re left with is a great adventure filled with murderous clowns, strange cops, headstrong goats, and an American tourist who can’t stop strangers. And while this kind of adventure game is outdated (though definitely not dead, as evidenced by the fact that a new Broken Sword is on the way), George and Nico’s adventures around the world undeniably hold up. And this is the best way to enjoy it.