Reader reviews for Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars page 2

STORY
The adventure is about the history and mystery of the Templar knights. The story upholds an intriguing tension and drives the player to want to find out what happens next. I feel that, despite being very captivating, the story could have a little more depth.

PUZZLES
The puzzles are not too difficult (maybe accept for a few of them, like the infamous goat) and seem to get a bit more challenging as the game progresses. The mechanics is a simple point-and-click without any variation of actions present in some other games like drawing or choosing that exactly to do with an object. The puzzles make sense and are often inductive but there is room for some more variation in terms of their mechanics. It would be nice if aside from inventory based puzzles, there also was some decoding to do or if the player had to use something in a special, maybe unusual way. Basically, while the sense and content of the puzzles are good, their mechanics are monotonous.

AESTHETICS
The graphics are very pretty, probably the apex of 2D adventures with high enough resolution for everything to be clear and look beautifully drawn. Of course the resolution could be higher but I think that it would remove some of the games artistic soul. The graphics are simply great! The music is good. It fits well into the game but it’s nothing memorable.

SUMMARY
If you haven’t played this game and you like adventure games then you should definitely try it. It’s a well balanced classic game that should be on the list of any, even half-time devoted, adventurist.

COMPARISON
“Broken Sword Shadow of Templars” (BS) is often compared to another 2D adventure from the same decade although released three years earlier, “Gabriel Knight the Sins of Fathers” (GK). People sometimes compare these two games on forums in debates aimed to elect the best adventure game. My opinion is that these two games, despite having some similarities like the in-game system of traveling between locations on the map and a historically inspired fictional story, they excel at different things. The more multi-threaded and divided into separate days story of GK has caught me a little bit closer to the screen than the still very captivating intrigue of BS. The story and character of GK are darker and more serious than that of BS. GK feels more like a thrilling criminal investigation while BS feels like an adventure with a mystery that also involves murder. I hope that this subjective comparison makes sense. And while puzzle mechanics, due to it’s versatility, is also better in GK, the fact that the game is three years older means that the graphics of GK is far worse than of BS. Three years in 1990s means a lot of evolution time of the graphics in games. Also BS is set in better locations.

Story: 4.5/5
Puzzles/Mechanics: 4/5
Setting/Climate: 5/5
Aesthetics: 4.5/5

It does not reach the level of inductive reasoning puzzles, but that is more or less not what P&C games do anyway.

This is a good game that deserves to be played.