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Quick Review: Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars
This art style doesn’t get old and works well for such games that don’t take themselves too seriously, but the animations are too slow and George should be able to run, to speed things up a little. However, the audio quality is poor in a few places, some lines seem recorded at different times or even by different people, some dialogues or events don’t quite follow what happened earlier, and you may miss some dialogue options if you don’t select them in a specific order. And the cutscenes that don’t have subtitles may be a problem, though at least the long one does have them.
But the most important aspect of an adventure game are the puzzles, and those tend to work well enough, though I could have used a journal. There were a few places where I tried pretty much everything until I accidentally stumbled into the solution and it’s a good thing that you can’t leave the Baphomet site in Paris, because I’d have never figured out what to do there and would have looked for a solution elsewhere otherwise, but I’d have managed to get through the game without a walkthrough if not for the infamous Goat Puzzle. And what’s frustrating is that I had just about figured it out, but only tried it the other way, and that was after having tried pretty much everything else, so I was thinking that I had hit a bug and checked. The toilet chain is probably a bug though, since it’s not used anywhere and then vanishes from inventory.
Otherwise, the return to Paris from Ireland is rather jarring, the first part from Spain and that from the train seem rushed, and the latter also struck me as unnecessary, and I definitely wondered how did George and Nico reach their destination after that. Plus that the romance is forced, and Nico’s too much of an unknown quantity. In fact, I was thinking early on that I’d have liked to at least be able to actually look around her apartment, to at least get some background information in that manner.