[ragnar]

Into stormy weather, a review of Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon by Ragnar Ouchterlony

Introduction

Once again world saving pair George Stobbart and Nicole Collard faces an adventure that will take them to many different places. This time they each witness a murder at different places, journalist Collard in Paris and patent lawyer Stobbart in Congo. In Paris, Nico finds out that someone has murdered a computer crypto expert, just before she is about to make an interview with him. Not just that, but the murderer has gone out of her way to try to make it look like it is Nicole that is perpetrator of the murderer and Nicole ends up in the jail for a couple of days. Meanwhile in Congo, George who is there to see a scientist named Cholmondely (which is an old English aristocratic name and naturally defies all logic when it comes to pronunciation and thus is pronounced Chumley) that wants to apply for a patent for an invention concerning geothermic energy. Before George can get to him though, he is cold-bloodedly murdered. They each quickly realise that they are not faced with any ordinary murder and that something is not right with the world and as usual, the only ones able to save the world from the dangers are George and Nico.

Game play

The director of the game, Charles Cecil, caused quite a stir in the adventure community when he pronounced the death of point and click adventure games and asserting that The Sleeping Dragon would definitely be a revolution to the adventure genre. When actually playing the game you begin to wonder what became of that revolution. The interface, for example, is quite similar to that of Grim Fandango, but more streamlined and more effective, but it's no revolution. There are still lots of problems with the interface, especially moving the character during shifting cameras and camera cuts get on your nerves, due to camera-relative motion instead of character relative motion. Positioning your character near important objects can also be a pain.

No, there are other areas where more improvement has been done. Cutscenes are not really cutscenes any more, since you need to act during them or face the consequences (usually it ends with the death of our beloved protagonist). This mostly just means that you have to press a button at the right time during the cutscene, but there are times that you need to do a little more than that and quick thinking are important. If you happen to fail, you will just have to do that sequence over again.

Another area not seen much of in adventure games that exists in abundance in The Sleeping Dragon is sneaking. In many areas you will encounter guards that you need to sneak by. This is done in a rather simplistic way, so the guards have very static routes and if they hear or see you, they will know exactly where you are and you'll get shot. On the other hand if you are far enough away they won't be able to see you at all (I always wondered, when playing the game why there weren't any guards with binoculars with night vision).

While there are many inventory puzzles in the game, there has been a move towards more physical puzzles, such as sneaking as mentioned above, puzzles involving pushing crates and big machine puzzles. There are especially lots of crate puzzles, which can be fun with a few, but in The Sleeping Dragon it became tedious, especially since you often need to push the crates some distance forth and back. The big machine puzzles, and here I mean puzzles where you have to solve some sort of ancient puzzle machine so that you are let through to the inner areas, are mostly well done, but often do not have very much to do with the story.

Broken Sword 3 features a real time 3D engine, something which has not been very much used in adventure games and the graphics are about average of what you can expect from a modern graphics engine, including shadows and other effects. More importantly, Revolution has succeeded in adopting the style from it's predecessors into the new three dimensional world. It is a little less like a cartoon, but it still has the attention to detail and rich environments that we have been used to from the first couple of games.

Aurally, there is nothing exceptional in either way. I honestly can't remember much of the music in the game, which indicates that the music was neither bad nor especially good. The voice acting on the other hand is very good and the relationship between George and Nico is well portrayed through their respective actors.

My thoughts

So, the game wasn't the revolution that we were promised and hoped for, but it certainly isn't a bad game because of that and it still is a distinct improvement in many ways. The Sleeping Dragon has a more fast paced game play than we are used to in adventure games and never lets the player rest during the cutscenes and the occasional sneaking gets you more alert to the surroundings.

One of the important parts with an adventure game for me is to, with my own thinking and cleverness, unravel the story. This is in many ways lacking with The Sleeping Dragon. Instead of me gathering information and thinking up solutions to the world wrecking problems the protagonist are face with, the solutions to the problems and what action to take are most often given by other persons in static dialogue scenes that you cannot influence in any way, something which was much better done in Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars. This way the player often gets inactive in terms of story development. You feel like it is a bit of story development followed by a bit of game play and then some story development and so on instead of game play and story development being intimately intertwined. Now you might think that I think it's not at all well done, but this isn't the case, I just had higher hopes from the game to begin with.

Someone might point out that the game is quite short and it is. It takes about 10 hours to play through, but still I don't think it's too short. There is lots of good story and game play packed into these 10 hours. I much prefer 10 hours of a quality game than 20 hours of average game and the quality of games have a tendency to dwindle with it's length. Another issue is that it is considerably harder to uphold the interest of the game the longer it gets. It either requires varied game play, very entertaining game play or a very solid story. Most often it isn't even enough with just one or two of these criteria.

All in all I heartily recommend all adventure game lovers to go out and buy this game since it delivers a quality story, with one of my favourite adventure game endings, and entertaining game play. While it isn't all we had hoped for and isn't quite as good as the first game in the series, it is still a very enjoyable game with plenty of humour, many great puzzles, interesting people to meet and exciting locations.

[Intrepid Homoludens]

Very good review, ragsie, and this in particular because you personalized it more with your angles on what a good adventure can be. Keep it up!

I hope you'll let me add that my feeling, upon finishing BS:TSD, is that this title doesn't so much revolutionize the concept, design, and execution of the adventure game as it does at least nudge it slightly forward. It's imperfect, we can all admit, but it is not anywhere near failingly disappointing. It does show that even just peaking your head outside the box can trigger some interesting ideas on how to present narrative in a fresh way - in this case, with dynamic camera angles (impossible to do in 2D), closeups, and in-game, in-engine cutscenes that never rudely rip the player out of the feeling of immersion (meaning that the gameplay-to-cutscene-to-gameplay stream is never interrupted, something that really annoys me when playing a game like The Longest Journey). In this vein I hope BS:TSD can trigger ideas in other developers to investigate how story, gameplay, and narrative exposition can be re-assessed, re-conceived, and re-introduced.

On that note, I think it's upcoming titles like Dreamfall and Fahrenheit that'll truly startle us gamers (and lesser developers) into experiencing the adventure game with new eyes.

[ragnar]

Originally Posted by Intrepid Homoludens

Very good review, ragsie, and this in particular because you personalized it more with your angles on what a good adventure can be. Keep it up!

Thank you! This one became the longest review I've done too and yet I feel I left out lots of things I wanted to say . I think I'll try to some non-adventuregame reviews sometime too.
.

Originally Posted by Intrepid Homoludens

I hope you'll let me add that my feeling, upon finishing BS:TSD, is that this title doesn't so much revolutionize the concept, design, and execution of the adventure game as it does at least nudge it slightly forward. It's imperfect, we can all admit, but it is not anywhere near failingly disappointing. It does show that even just peaking your head outside the box can trigger some interesting ideas on how to present narrative in a fresh way - in this case, with dynamic camera angles (impossible to do in 2D), closeups, and in-game, in-engine cutscenes that never rudely rip the player out of the feeling of immersion (meaning that the gameplay-to-cutscene-to-gameplay stream is never interrupted, something that really annoys me when playing a game like The Longest Journey). In this vein I hope BS:TSD can trigger ideas in other developers to investigate how story, gameplay, and narrative exposition can be re-assessed, re-conceived, and re-introduced.

On that note, I think it's upcoming titles like Dreamfall and Fahrenheit that'll truly startle us gamers (and lesser developers) into experiencing the adventure game with new eyes.

I can only agree that there are many improvements to the genre. In difference to The Watchmaker, BS3 used camera angles in a very good way. As for the cutscenes, yes, they were executed in a very good way and I agree that they should be done in-engine. I also liked that they really weren't proper cutscenes anymore and that you have to take action during them, but, I also feel that there still is much to be done, the action is often very limited (just press a button) and I would ultimately like the concept of cutscenes to disappear. Game play and story developmnet should be so intimately intertwined that they are nearly indistinguishable in my mind. All in all, I feel the game play of BS3 is not linked with the story development and as I said in the review, it was better done in BS1. I really liked the story telling of BS3, much more so than it's game play. And it might shine through the review that I had hoped for much more in terms of game play, but it still is a very good game.