#oneaday Day 651: Circle of Blood

Having beaten Xenoblade, I was in two minds as to what to play next. Should I go and grab something brand new, or should I delve into the Pile of Shame?

I opted for the latter. Broken Sword, to be specific, and the new(er) Director’s Cut version, which features (marginally) updated graphics and some extra Nico-centric scenarios. The new stuff so far is cool — some immensely satisfying codebreaking puzzles are a particular highlight — but the fact that the sound quality is so markedly different to that from the original game is a little jarring.

I have fond memories of Broken Sword. It came out when I was doing work experience down on PC Zone. That particular issue saw me writing a bunch of captions for some material about Quake, and publishing an entire review on Virtua Fighter PC in which I used the then-fashionable terminology on Zone of “turbo nutter ninja bastard” to mean “very powerful”. But that’s beside the point.

Broken Sword comes from a very different era to the console-centric experiences we have today. This is obvious in a number of ways. Firstly, it’s a point and click adventure, and while we do still get some of those nowadays, they’re a lot rarer than they used to be — and I can’t remember the last time a point and click adventure would have been regarded as a triple-A title. Secondly, none of the characters feel the need to run everywhere. They saunter around at a leisurely pace, mercifully just short of being infuriatingly slow. This relative slowness, however, gives the game a much more “sedate” feeling pace while you’re playing — it’s almost relaxing to play, despite the fact that you’re chasing down a murderer.

Perhaps it’s the sensation of using your brain in ways it hasn’t been used for a while. The concept of “puzzles” in a lot of adventure-style games these days tends to (still) involve pushing blocks around or finding ways to get to switches. Broken Sword, meanwhile, involves good old fashioned adventure game puzzles. In order to open a door early in the game, you need to pull on a cross on the wall, wedge it open with a shell casing you found earlier, insert a stone tube into a socket that opens up, pull out the shell casing (which hopefully you had remembered to flatten under the door earlier, otherwise you’ll have to repeat the above process) and use it to lever open the stuck door that had been partly activated by your insertion of the stone tube. It sounds a little silly, sure, but it makes sense while you’re playing — and by golly it’s satisfying when you work it out for yourself without the aid of GameFAQs. And it’s not as stupid as the rubber ducky puzzle in The Longest Journey, a game I’m finding myself hankering to replay very soon.

Broken Sword is quite impressive in that it has been around for a very long time in computer game terms and still “works” as a game today. Sure, the pace may seem relatively snail-like to console gamers (though the original did come out on PS1 and Game Boy Advance, among others) but there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the puzzle and dialogue-heavy gameplay. In fact, we could stand for a few more games like that these days, and a few less that involve you staring down the barrel of a gun.