Thoughts on: Broken Sword 5 – the Serpent’s Curse

Thoughts on: Broken Sword 5 – the Serpent’s Curse

It’s probably the second best Broken Sword game after the first one, tied in a way with the second one. It’s also probably not a great adventure game for 2013, nor a proper evolution for the series and its characters.

It is nice to have Nico and George back, personally I could never go through the 3D games in the series (even though I heard 3 is actually rather okay), dropping them pretty early on and Director’s Cut of the first game actually made the game slightly worse due to rather weak additions that broke a very good pace of the original. But updated second game and rather promising start of these made me want to expect more. Yes, the art is sometimes crappy, all pre-rendered cutscenes look horrible due to very-very bad compression, but overall the style, the controls and the feel of the game Revolution were going for is great.

Broken Sword 5 - the Serpent's Curse. Поедая свой хвост

But then comes a weird feeling that all excitement from the game comes only from the fact that Nico and George work so well together and some interesting religious themed mythology conspiracy is just a potentially good topic to explore, but… it’s like that’s what the entire game hangs on. Puzzles themselves are rarely “what now” or feel needlessly hard, but the NEED for those puzzles seems weird. You need to remove a roach that doesn’t even try to hide, but instead of just crushing it and swiping remains under the table, you need to complete a puzzle and use 2 items to catch that roach, just so he would then hang in your inventory for most of the game to be used in a single puzzle, many events later, in a completely different part of the world. George is a collectathon enthusiast, sure, but why would he even consider doing something so complicated and pointless, when he’s on a very tight schedule and things are quickly getting out of control? And that’s what happens with quite a lot puzzles – they just feel forced in just to be puzzles, which feels old even compared to some classic adventure games. Making a puzzle easy doesn’t make it less annoying that puzzle shouldn’t even exist in the first place.

Broken Sword 5 - the Serpent's Curse. Поедая свой хвост

And the story as well just feels like it has a lot of wasted potential. Writing is mostly good, a lot of jokes are funny and witty, but then there are some strangely outdated stereotypes as if straight from franco-Belgian comic books like Tintin, or European adventure movies of mid-90s. It’s never painfully bad, but just often unnecessary. Episodes also feel very strongly divided into “this is the crime part”, “this is the mythology mystery part”, which just feels… wrong. Understandable for a game originally released in two parts but making you question if doing so, at least in this way, was a smart move.
That said, it’s still an enjoyable adventure for those, who loved the classic Broken Sword games. For those who didn’t play those, though? I don’t know if it’s going to be a particularly interesting game, honestly.

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