Next year marks twenty years since British dev house Revolution Studios released Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars. It’s revered, rightly so, as one of the genre’s finest, and Revolution would go on to make several more classics in the Broken Sword series. A couple of years ago, they got nearly twice as much funding as they asked for to make Broken Sword 5, and even chose to self-publish rather than sign on with a big name publisher, which is pretty darn impressive.
I think it speaks to how personal the folks at Revolution take this series, and its characters. And to that end, if you’ve been with the Broken Sword series this long, expect some fantastic fan service during the adventures of part five. I actually have not played Broken Sword 3 nor 4 yet, but they’re “on the list.” So even I missed out on several of the references and fan service goodies, but I did not see this as being a detriment to my experience, but rather an encouragement to go back and play the whole series. Yeah, it’s that good. Moreover, from what I can tell, the fan service moments are mostly derived from encountering previously introduced characters while you’re investigating the story events of 5. You won’t get all of the references in the dialog not having played the previous ones, but you can select the character in question from the menu and read more about them.
Ok, that aside, what do we have here with Broken Sword 5 (BS5)? I would argue it’s the best pure adventure game on the PS4, or at least it’s rubbing shoulders with Grim Fandango: Remastered. BS5 is a point-and-click adventure that works really well on the PS4. This is one of my all-time favorite genres, although BS5 marks only about the third title in said genre I have completed on a console. I did so in just the matter of a couple of days, too, because it was that compelling and paced so well. It took me about fifteen hours according to my savegame timestamp, although as much as two hours of this could have been caused by the lack of a pause function in the game. You can press Start, and a menu appears from which you can exit to the main menu, view hints, save or load your game, or view the characters you have encountered, but a traditional ‘pause’ state it appears not to be.
Anyway, embarking on another adventure with George Stobbart (honestly — one of the most under-appreciated characters in gaming) and French journalist Nicolette Collard (aka Nico), was perfect for a mostly-lazy Labor Day weekend. I had the “advantage” of playing the first two BS games, although it’s been probably fifteen years, and so I was loosely familiar with the duos past exploits. There is a faint romantic connection between the two. I would go as far as to say it’s one of the best developed romantic relationships in gaming because it’s so believable and it never stumbles over itself. In other words, as you play through these games, BS5 included, you’re aware of their underlying attraction but it’s never overbearing or forced, and I really respect that.
In BS5, the team of George and Nico waste little time getting accidentally mixed up in their next grand adventure. It begins with Nico arriving at a Parisian art gallery and bumping into George. George, now an assets asssesor for an insurance company, is on sight to witness the proceedings of the exhibition. Nico is there to cover it for the Paris newspaper she writes for. The center point of the exhibition is the mysterious La Maledicció, a painting with a whole lot going, much more than just meets the eye it seems. Within moments of the story starting, there is a murder and a theft, both of which George and Nico are witnesses to. Nico wants to investigate this to finally get that frontpage story, while George is committing himself to this because he needs to protect his company’s finances (as they insured the stolen painting) as well as his job.
Their reasoning for getting involved and spear-heading the investigation is moot, but it’s up to you to guide them through numerous puzzles across a variety of locations. At different, scripted points in the the game, you will control either George or Nico, although primarily George, and during most of the second half of the game the two are traveling and solving puzzles together. You’ll meet a couple of dozen NPCs and have as many interesting or awkward (in an intentionally funny way) conversations with them. Case in point, no matter how dire the situation was, when it was my turn to speak, I would often “break the proverbial ice” by offering the NPC half of a broken cookie that I got early in the game and in another country. It at least made me chuckle, because George’s presentation to the NPC, who might be wielding a gun for example, was legitimately serious, making the situation all the more funny and memorable. Of course on the other hand, the majority of the dialog is to the point and all together very well written and performed via excellent voice-acting. Of note, Rolf Saxon, who has voiced George throughout the entire series, reprises his role here, while Nico’s character sees its fifth actress now, hah.
I thought the difficulty of the game was paced really well, with the first half or so of the adventure having clear, straight-forward, I would even say comfortable puzzle design, in which reasonable logic and attention-paying will get a player through unscathed. Later in the game, however, there were I think four or five puzzles where I had to make deep use of the Hint System. The built-in hint system is a welcomed thing in my opinion, although I can understand that purists may feel differently. For me, with time being ever harder to come by, I’d much rather take a quick hint and move on than become exhausted in my trial and error and run out of time to play for that session. Usually one peek at the hint system is enough, and my rule of thumb was to basically give a fully-stumped situation about ten minutes to fully ‘stew’ before I caved in for a hint.
Most situations in BS5 are such that options are pretty limited — you aren’t having to manage a bunch of locations or a very large inventory, so brute-forcing through a scene can often work but normally its not necessary thanks to good puzzle design. Other times, however, such as deciphering a telegram or translating symbols into directions on a map, proved too cumbersome for even two or three hints. But we’re talking about four or five instances out of easily 100+ throughout the course of the game. The vast majority of the puzzles were of great design, empowering players with correct predictions at times, and yet also proving just head-scratching enough to make the puzzles all the more rewarding to solve.
BS5 also deserves high marks for its presentation quality. I mentioned the quality voice-acting earlier, but just as impressive is the artwork that makes, quite literally, every scene ‘pop.’ You’ll want to look over every detail, not just for finding the things you need to Examine or Interact with, but also because it’s worth taking in due to the concerted effort that was put into the art. Oh, I also liked how the DS4’s speaker was used for item-received jingles and for phone calls. Whenever your character makes or receives a phone call, you hear the other person on the DS4 speaker, which sounds pretty much perfect for what a phone call should sound like. It’s also nice that the controller (optionally) vibrates when your cursor is passing over an item of interest.
I enjoyed nearly every bit of BS5, but there were a couple of relatively minor glitches. I actually had one crash that kicked me to the XMB, but jumping back in the game and re-loading moments before this crash was all I had to do, no other crashes were experienced. I did have two or maybe three instances of where my cursor just floated over to the left side of the screen and I just had to press Start to “pause” the game and then Circle to go back in and it was fine. The last technical glitch I had may not be so much a glitch as just the way it was designed, but there were probably ten times throughout the game where there was a two-or-three second stutter or delay between me pressing X and the game responding to that action. This also was not a game or experience-breaking issue, and it’s probably something a simple patch could fix.
With that, let’s head to the summary to wrap things up!