Gonna try and play through the entire Broken Sword series (despite playing most of them, I've only beaten 1 and 5), which is as good a reason as any to revisit this. I've played it about half a dozen times since first checking out the DS port in 2013, and it's probably my favourite 90s adventure game.

It's a very cozy adventure where a lot of the dialogue makes me smile and occasionally laugh a bunch, helped greatly by the voice acting which lends a lot of flavour to the conversations. I'm particularly impressed by how much each area you head to feels like a place you truly get to know, despite only being comprised of a handful of rooms and three or four people to talk to at any time.

I remembered most of the puzzle solutions at the back of my mind, so I took the opportunity to mine more conversations out of characters I previously ignored and showed as many items to everyone as I could. There's a lot of fun tiny discussions to be had, but I noticed that there aren't as many unique replies after the halfway point - with either quick and dirty "does this mean anything?" "no" conversations or George straight up deciding not to even bother. I wish the game had a little more time in the oven so there could have been more unique convos written and voiced, but I get how that can happen.

Still, it was very nice to come back to these familiar places and faces once more, and super cozy playing it on a laptop where I could click on something, sit back and enjoy the story being told. Heck yeah.

This game will always have a special place in my heart as the original version was the first video game I've ever played.
I fondly remember lazy Sundays, spent on the computer with my older sister, trying to figure out what exactly we need to do with that damn clown nose. It certainly made me fall in love with point and click adventures, a love that is still very much alive today.

The Director's Cut does a wonderful job of reviving one of the most iconic games of the genre (and some of my dearest memories).
Goofy, yet charming voice acting, paired with a lovely art style and interesting puzzles. The plot is quite ridiculous at times but honestly? Broken Sword never claimed to take itself too seriously.

This one is a gem.

I haven't really explored the world of point-and-click adventure games so I wasn't sure what to expect when I started Broken Sword. It didn't take long to realise I'd made a good choice.

Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars has a captivating story that had me hooked from the start. It has some great humour and is full of personality. It is so much fun interacting with the different characters throughout the story.

I am so happy I decided to give it a go, it was a nice change of pace for me. What makes it even better is that there are more Broken Sword games to try,  I can't wait to play them all.

O maior valor de Broken Sword está em seu roteiro. Sério e bem escrito, a trama mistura ficção e realidade de forma similar a grandes nomes de outras mídias, especialmente Literatura.

O seu design de jogo é muito básico no seu gênero de Adventure Point'n'Click, tanto pela época, 1996, quando foi criado, como também por falta de criatividade dos desenvolvedores, que não tiveram ideias fora do padrão.

Ainda assim, um ótimo título do gênero.

Played the original version, loved the puzzles, characters, music and atmosphere of the decors.
Story was really interesting and the humor was done just right.

Still had some ? moments like the goat where the mechanic of the puzzle was introduced weirdly, so i thought i was stuck missing an item or something because earlier puzzles all had the same mechanics. Happened rarely tho so it's whatever.

Based on all that it was a really good game overall.

Could be a bit of a drag and long-winded at times, especially too much talking and words a little small

but i was playing on my phone and have a short attention span so the game is probably not to fault for that

overall still pretty enjoyable and i was quite hooked

When I looked through the extras of the Broken Sword Director’s Cut version, I noticed that they also included the original version of the game. Apart from the beginning which is different compared to the original version’s opening, and of course including Nicole Collard as a playable character, I thought the dialogue and gameplay would be pretty much the same besides the change in graphics and cutscenes.

Out of curiosity, since I haven’t played the game yet, I checked out a random longplay video and checked the comments section, and noticed from one commenter that in that time stamp, they completely changed the dialogue for George Stobbart, the main lead character for Broken Sword 1. This was already good enough evidence to make me question the authenticity and quality of this remake or “Director’s Cut”, so I decided to try out the original game instead.

Needless to say, I was immediately hooked and intrigued by not only the story and characters, but also the 2D animation and background drawn and digitally colored in photoshop, this was developed in 1996 by the way, by animator Mike Burgess who worked for Red Rover animation studio. Of course, the cutscene animations were pixelated, same with the in-game graphics, but at least they were attempting to resemble or replicate that classic animated film style they were going for.

When it came time to play the remake version of the game, the first big red flag was that they completely changed the opening monologue of the story, and had Nicole narrate it. Having Nicole narrate wasn’t a big deal, and of course they had to write it from her perspective to differentiate from George’s, but I preferred the opening monologue from George in the original over the remake. They did reuse the original opening credits song from the soundtrack of the original which was, again, no big deal. Then, after the credits, listening to some of the dialogue, especially Nicole’s, and watching the in-game cutscenes definitely made me cringe a little. It wasn’t all bad, but I could tell they poorly stitched up this remake between the new ones, like Nicole’s 3D in-game model for example, which stuck out like a sore thumb when you play as George, and the old ones.

First off, The in-game cutscenes, especially the animated cutscenes, were decent enough, or at least not too bad, but there were parts of the animation that made it look really obvious that they patched the cutscene animation together with Adobe Flash.

What was really disappointing to me was that the in-game models were animated in 3D instead of 2D. It wouldn’t be too bad except that they don’t always use these 3D models, or even use them at all because when we get to George’s point-of-view, they reverted to the 2D animation style of in-game models, or just straight up reusing the in-game models from the original game. Also, do I need to mention how terrible these 3D in-game models look?

The developers also changed up the art style and art design for the remake, so they hired Dave Gibbons for some odd reason. Why they did this, I don’t know, but Dave Gibbons’ style in this game is serviceable at least, but nothing spectacular, at least with the Adobe Flash animation job anyway. However, what’s the point of changing the art style for the cutscenes and character models when they’re reusing animation from the original game? Apart from the character portraits, they might as well just stick with polishing up the graphics of the original, or transition the graphics from 2D pixelated animation to 2D drawn animation, if they’re just rehashing or reusing old assets from the original. Overall, hiring Dave Gibbons to create additional art and changing up the art style for this game was completely pointless besides Gibbons ripping off Moebius for the remainder of his comic art career.

Then, there’s the dialogue, including the rewritten dialogue compared to the original. Like I said earlier, not all of it was bad besides the shitty rewrites, including for George, but at the beginning for Nicole’s prologue scenario, I was getting some bad Joss Whedon vibes from some of the pseudo-snarky talk from Nicole. That kind of cliche, shitty pseudo-talk that brainlet leftoids like to use just need to die in a hole along with disco and the rest of the millennial trends and fashions that many leftoids stole from previous eras. Then, there was George’s dialogue at the beginning which the commenter in one of the longplay videos mentioned before said that they rewrote or changed the opening line from the original. That’s the type of shitty dialogue I would expect from Niel Druckmann. Why, in the first place, did they completely change the overall tone of a guy who just survived a bomb explosion, nevermind the ENTIRE tone of the whole story to some pseudo-snarky “oh it’s a pretty serious situation but not really” kind of story-telling that would make Joss Whedon blush? Also, despite not playing further into the original game, it’s completely out of character for George to say that, and then the rest of the dialogue is just reused or rehashed from the original, including the AUDIO from the original game, that the developers used for this “remake.” It’s also so out of place for someone reacting to a BOMB EXPLOSION that could’ve KILLED HIM, never mind the injuries and/or deaths of the people inside the cafe (at least for two of the characters who were inside the cafe, anyway). In the original, what George said was very profound and well-executed over an event that pulled himself, including the players, into trying to unravel this mysterious conspiracy. In the remake, “Oh, he’s a typical snarky American who had his vacation ruined by a murderous clown, and he’s gonna find out who did it because JUSTICE MATTERS, and Americans are all about truth, justice, and the American way, and also I’m gonna crack about being about money since I’m a lawyer because Americans LOVE money, right?” Seriously, where the hell did all the subtlety go? Not just in the story, but in the writing as well?

Overall, this looks like a piss-poor remake of a video game, and I’ll be avoiding that version of the game so it wouldn’t ruin my first-time experience in playing the first game in the Broken Sword series, especially for the let’s play series. It’s disappointing to say the least, but I’m glad I checked out both versions before doing a playthough of the director’s cut. It’s not as disappointing or insultingly terrible as the Warcraft III “remastered” version. However, it’s still pretty bad for a remastered version nonetheless. With terrible Joss-Whedon-esk and Niel-Druckmann-esk dialogue, unimpressive art style and 3D in-game models, it’s general rehashing, overall pointless Nicole scenes, shitty puzzles to start off with, and reuse of not only the cutscene animation, but also the dialogue and some minor and shitty changes to the dialogue, this DIRECTOR’S CUT is one that I’ll avoid playing, but at least they had the decency to include the original.

Las secuencias añadidas, en las que tomamos el control de Nico, no aportan nada revolucionario pero son bienvenidas, no hacen que se resienta el ritmo ni alargan en exceso el juego.

Los cambios estilísticos me parecen correctos en general, y hay algún que otro nuevo minijuego bien implementado.

Eso sí, lo de que ya no puedas morir, aunque entiendo que le ahorrará frustraciones a más de uno, para mí le quita parte de la gracia.