|
|
||||
|
Studio: |
Revolution
Software |
|||
|
Designer(s): |
Charles
Cecil |
|||
|
Part of series: |
Broken
Sword |
|||
|
Release: |
September 30, 1996 (original) / March 21, 2009 (Director’s Cut) |
|||
|
Main credits: |
Producers: Charles Cecil, Chris Dudas, Steve Ince, Michael
Merren Writers: Charles Cecil, Dave Cummins,
Jonathan Howard Art: Eoghan Cahill, Neil Breen, Mike
Burgess Music: Barrington Pheloung |
|||
|
Useful links: |
Complete
playthrough (Director’s Cut; 9
parts, 574 mins.) |
|
|
|
|
Once upon a time, there
used to exist an entire colorful industry of adventure-themed comic books, in
which all sorts of sympathetic, sprightly, somewhat naïve, and, well,
adventurous characters roamed the world to solve its many mysteries and
unravel its darkest conspiracies. This industry still exists, of course, but
it’s been a long time since it looked the way it looked in the
pre-post-modern era — simple and innocent, sometimes sadly tainted with the
vices of commonplace colonialism, Orientalism, and plain old racism, but just
as often offering its customers beginners’ lessons in how to fight all these
things. The genre was more European than American, since in the States the
chief emphasis had always rather been on crime-fighting superheroes, yet it
was loved all over the world, and even your humble servant remembers with
fondness his childhood hunt for all the volumes of Hergé’s Adventures of Tintin, which were
completely unavailable in the Soviet Union at the time. In the world of movies, the
single greatest tribute to those young and innocent days was arguably Lucas’
and Spielberg’s Indiana Jones — but
in the world of adventure games, somehow, despite the word «adventure» itself,
no such tribute really existed as late as the mid-1990s. Of course, there had been plenty of adventure games in
which your characters roamed the various corners of the world to unravel the
mysteries — in fact, LucasArts made two adventure games based on Indiana
Jones himself — but they did not really have the light, old-fashioned,
wide-eyed babe-in-the-woods attitude of one of those ye olde comic books like
Tintin In The Congo or something
like that. You could have your Roberta Williams fairy-tale, your Ron Gilbert
smarty-pants post-modern grin, some nice detective story or a spooky bit of
horror, but there was most definitely a niche waiting to be filled. In stepped Charles Cecil, a
young British game developer whose early childhood, somewhat ironically, had
been spent in the Congo (which his parents had to flee after Mobutu Sese
Seko’s coup in 1965). He and his company, Revolution Software, had already
made a name for themselves in the video industry with their two first games,
the fantasy tale Lure Of The Temptress
(1992) and the dystopian sci-fi adventure Beneath
A Steel Sky (1994). Yet neither of the two was good enough for Cecil to
become the love of his life (though he did return to sci-fi thematics with
the sequel, Beyond A Steel Sky, as
late as 2020). What he really
craved for was an Adventure game with a capital A — one that could immerse
the player in a colorful, old-fashioned, china-shop-meets-dark-alley universe
like Tintin’s, of which Cecil is a
self-acknowledged fan (and you could tell it in a flash just by playing the
game, without even reading any of his interviews). For his principal subject matter, Cecil
chose the Knights Templar — not exactly a fresh subject, but one that had
been recently refreshed thanks to Indiana
Jones And The Last Crusade, as well as properly fattened up with the 1982
publication of Holy Blood, Holy Grail,
the quintessential nonsense book to have inspired so many juicy works of art,
from The Da Vinci Code to Jane
Jensen’s third Gabriel Knight game. Charles Cecil, however, was there first,
though he barely scratched the surface of the intrigue — which, admittedly,
was more than enough for the genre he wanted to reflect in his game. For his principal location, Cecil chose
Paris — not so much the actual Paris of 1996 as the mythologized, idealistic
bourgeois Paris of French textbooks and, well, comic books — however, there
would naturally be multiple other locations in the game, since Adventure with
a capital A is quite impossible without lots of travel. Yet for the principal
character who would be doing most of the travel, Cecil preferred an American
rather than a Frenchman — either to make the game more marketable for an
American audience, or to make it more fun by means of the trusty «an American
in Paris» cliché, or, most probably, both. In any case, meet George
Stobbart ("two B’s and two T’s", in George’s own words), the
friendly and nosey American intellectual who would go on to star in no fewer
than five Broken Sword games and
become one of the most iconic protagonists in the history of story-based
video games (and a sixth one might well be in the works). The result was a smashing critical and
commercial success — Beneath A Steel
Sky had already established the reputation of Revolution Software as a
serious player, but Broken Sword: The
Shadow Of The Templars (for some reason, originally titled Circle Of Blood in the States)
singlehandedly put the company on the same level with such top competitors as
Sierra On-Line and LucasArts (both of whom it would actually manage to outlive
by playing it smart and avoiding risky business decisions). Reviewers praised
almost every aspect of the game, buyers were delighted, and for a brief while
it really seemed that point-and-click adventure games might have found a new,
highly promising direction, breaking up the solid, but already predictable
and somewhat obsolete formulae of the old giants. That hope did not last long
— in fact, much of it was extinguished already with the second game in the
series — but the reputation of Templars
has endured, and even today rare indeed would be a best-of adventure game
list that would forget to place it somewhere close to the highest ranks. I myself was very late to the party,
having mostly lost interest in adventure gaming with the demise of Sierra and
LucasArts, and did not pick up a copy until much later, already after Cecil
had revived the title with a special Director’s
Cut (in 2009), remastering the game for consoles and higher-end PCs,
redesigning its interface, and throwing in lots of additional sections,
primarily those in which you also have to play as Nico Collard, George’s
journalist sidekick and future love interest. My review will, therefore, be
centered around the special rather than the original edition, though I did at
least watch some gameplay of the original version to understand the main
differences; they will affect those
suffering from childhood nostalgia, but it is clear that if the game will
live on into the future, it is the Director’s
Cut that most people will be playing — and while I certainly do not think
that this is the best adventure game ever made, I have no doubt that it does
deserve to live on into the future. |
||||
|
Content evaluation |
||||
|
Just like one of them good old Tintin adventures, Shadow Of The Templars begins relatively
low-key — as a murder mystery (a double murder mystery in the Director’s Cut, with Nico Collard
witnessing the shooting of one character and George Stobbart accidentally
caught up in an explosion causing the death of another), which gradually
escalates into something far more complex and sprawling, ultimately revealing
a megalomaniacal plot to take over the world which George and Nico have no
choice but to stop in its tracks. The plot will take both of them all across
the posh and the slummy areas of Paris, as well as across the border to
Ireland, Spain, Scotland, and even a remote village in Syria, where they
shall meet all sorts of colorful characters, uncover enough mystical secrets
to fill up an encyclopedia, risk their lives on countless occasions, and (in
the case of Nico) even have the opportunity to reassess their family history. Let me get this out of the way first
and foremost, though: the plot of
the game — and this applies even more strongly to all of its sequels — is
fundamentally crappy, and I have no doubt that Charles Cecil himself is well
aware of that. I am not even going to waste space and time on going into
details (just play the game or consult Wikipedia): all those Neo-Templar
cults, idols of Baphomet, murders, burglaries, and conspiracies largely just
recycle old pulpy clichés which were hardly brilliant in the first
place. Even some of the Tintin
adventures, with Hergé at his best, could have more character, soul,
and invention to their plots than Cecil, to whom the story in these games
always takes third, if not thirty-third, place to everything else. Nor does the author give much of a damn
to historical depth. Apparently, Cecil did travel to Paris and conduct some research
on the Templars, but whatever he may have learned was not integrated too
seriously in the game. All we need to know, ultimately, about the Templars,
is that they’d discovered a MacGuffin, and that their modern day followers
are looking for the MacGuffin to help them rule the world. If you want a game
that attempted to take the Templar lore with a bit of actual respect, look no
further than Gabriel Knight 3; this
game approaches the subject with about as much delicacy as Hergé
approached the topic of the Soviet Union in his Tintin Au Pays Des Soviets at the earliest stages of his career. Arguably the only general strength of
the plot lies in its amazing diversity, almost unprecedented for an adventure
game of its time. Already the Paris section swiftly moves its characters from
the gaudiest locations of the city to regular «bourgeois» living quarters and
from there, to dirty and unpleasant sewers — or to places where funny and
unexpected culture clashes take place, such as George’s encounter with an
aristocratic British lady who helps him overcome the stuffiness of a typically
French clerk ("an Anglo-American alliance that actually worked!",
in Lady Piermont’s own words). Less than midway through the game, George is
whisked away to Ireland, where you have to help him sort things out with the
everyday customers of a classic pub; from there, we are taken away to a
lively market in Syria, then to a remote mansion in Spain, and then, finally,
to a rundown stone castle in the depths of Scotland. Ultimately, there is just so much
happening that you actually have to step back a bit and assess the general
picture to understand that none of what you see makes much sense, that none
of the characters may be taken seriously (at least, not as far as they are
related to the main story), and that there is nothing genuinely outstanding about
any of the twists and turns that the plot takes along the way. But if you
thought that Charles Cecil himself might take offense at you for feeling this
way, the ending of the game, hopefully, will reassure you of the opposite.
Once you get to the final climactic denouement, it is over in less than five
minutes (perhaps a bit more, depending on how much time it takes you to crack
the final puzzle), as abruptly as things typically come to an end in a
Hitchcock movie — and subsequent games would make this even more obvious,
totally cutting out any farewell scenes or epilogues, to save you from the
danger of taking the time to read something much more than necessary into the
story. It was all about the suspense, the action, the intrigue, the
characters, the atmosphere, and, in Cecil’s case, the puzzles — it was never
about «what is the philosophical significance of what just happened?» (Of
course, you can discuss the
philosophy of Hitchcock, but it is found in the personalities of the characters rather than in their actions). As frustrating and disappointing as
this shallowness might come across, there are certain angles from which Cecil
could even be commended for making such a light-headed, simple-and-stupid
game precisely at the time when adventure games, armed with recent
technological advances, seemed to be taking a sharp turn towards depth and
maturity — Cecil, on the other hand, made use of exactly the same
technological advances (graphics, sound, voice acting) to create an
unabashedly retro experience, practically a love letter to those strange
times when the grass was greener and complex issues could be handled
simplistically without anybody complaining. What is even more admirable is
how the man, with the tenacity of a veteran bulldog, managed to carry that
aesthetics almost unchanged through the next two decades, sticking to his
guns through thick and thin the same way Angus Young sticks to his school
uniform. Curiously, The Director’s Cut, in its introduction of Nico as a playable character,
did seem to try and make a very small step in the direction of giving more
depth and sense to the plot and at least one of its heroes. Unlike George,
who is mostly all about solving the mystery and staying alive, Nico is shown
as somebody deeply concerned over her family history, shocked by the awful
revelations about her own father, disturbed by at least some aspects of the
murders and betrayals going on around her, and tends, on the whole, to behave
more like an actual human being than a completely conjectural, cartoonish
character. On their own, these additions work reasonably well — but there is
a huge dissonance between them and the rest of the game, not to mention
Nico’s personality in subsequent games, which displays none of the
psychological complexity of the Director’s
Cut additions (unsurprisingly, since all but one of these subsequent
games were produced before, not after the Director’s
Cut). It is, therefore, not surprising that not all veteran fans, judging
by their Web reactions, were all that fond of the additions. Imagine James
Bond, after disposing of yet another of his SPECTRE enemies, substituting the
expected one-liner for "was it worth the tears of a tortured
child?" (Better yet, don’t
imagine it, or you might end up in the director’s seat). It is not, of course, as if the typical
adventure game of the 20th century was generally distinguished by a masterful
and meaningful plot — but I do wish to emphasize just how much Shadow Of The Templars went against
the grain of the time, taking a sharp turn into the oncoming lane with its
retro aesthetics. The fact that it went on to achieve such unexpected success
should, by itself, be inspirational to all who want to make their personal
mark upon the world but are too afraid of not finding their audiences and end
up latching on to current trends and losing their identity. And, of course,
the personality of Shadow Of The
Templars has nothing to do with its story — it is all about its
atmosphere, which we will get around to shortly. |
||||
|
Shadow
Of The Templars did
not revolutionize the established puzzle mechanic models of the
point-and-click adventure game, but it did put its own subtle twist on them.
First, unlike the typical Sierra and LucasArts game in which actual puzzles
(logic puzzles, construction puzzles, mazes, etc.) were always extremely
limited as compared to situational challenges, solvable through dialog and
object manipulation, Shadow
explicitly acknowledges such puzzles as being more or less on par with
everything else. The game is not exactly Myst,
but you will have to spend lots of
time wrecking your brain over grotesquely complicated locking systems,
linguistic codes, chessboards, and optical phenomena to get where you’re
going, and if you are a seasoned adventurer who tends to think of such things
as nuisances, not fun, Shadow Of The
Templars, as well as all of its successors, are definitely not for you. Of course, in a game that tries to
follow in the footsteps of Tintin
and Indiana Jones, franchises that
more or less assume that the entire world population is split into two halves
— our ancestors, who design insanely complex traps for future generations,
and future generations that try to show themselves worthy of the mighty
intellect of their ancestors — in such a game, logic puzzles are to be
expected as the norm. I remember almost rage-quitting at being unable to
crack the very first one in The
Director’s Cut (where Nico has to dismantle two locks which some Parisian
dumbass has constructed as tricky sliding puzzles), but from a reasonably
impartial standpoint, most of these puzzles seem to be fair — at least, to
the player who knows a thing or two about them and is not mathematically /
geometrically challenged, like I am — on the other side, with my linguistic
background and all, I quite enjoy the code-breaking puzzles, which may well
be a thorn in somebody else’s backside. That
is actually the treacherous circumstance: in his admirable attempt to make
the puzzles as diverse as possible, Cecil made sure that there will most
probably be at least one or two moments of absolute impasse for any given
group of players. Oh well, at least we know that the Internet is for
walkthroughs. The «regular» puzzles are not too
difficult; apart from the usual necessity to pick up everything that is not
nailed down and manipulate your inventory to find the right solution, success
frequently depends on talking to the correct character at the correct time to
receive the right cue, and, occasionally, on proper timing. It was, of
course, the latter that was responsible for the infamous «Goat Puzzle», which
allegedly cost the nerves of miriads of adventure gamers back in 1996, when
Internet walkthroughs were hard to come by — a challenge based on properly
timing your way out of a tricky situation. (For The Director’s Cut,
Cecil simplified that puzzle to the point of making it trivial — which was
doubly silly, since /a/ by that time, anybody could look up the solution on
the Web and /b/ he could have at least replaced it by something more logical,
yet still worthy of a challenge). But in reality, what makes the Goat Puzzle
so difficult is precisely the fact that the other puzzles are generally quite trivial in comparison; since
you do not have to bother about timing your actions right until your meeting
with the goat, it catches you unawares and messes you up. That said, trivial or not, nobody could
deny that Cecil really makes you work for your money (literally). While about
half of the game will have you simply talking to its characters, the other
half will be all about thinking your way out of situations — and in most
cases, the challenge will amount to much more than just picking up an object
in one location and giving it to another character in another location. Most
of your tasks — how to get into Khan’s room at the hotel? how to get money to
pay the Syrian driver? how to break through to the ailing witness in the
hospital? — can only be solved in several stages, at least one of which will
not be logically obvious in the least («bad design», some will say, but
that’s debatable — if all the puzzles were always logically obvious, what
would be the challenge in that?). In the modern world, I just do not see how
anybody could be patient enough to get through it all without a walkthrough,
but hey, that’s classic adventure gaming for you. At least Cecil loyally follows the
LucasArts formula — there are very few situations when you can die in the
game (and you are immediately revived anyway), and no situations where you
could get deadlocked because you forgot to pick up an object in Ireland that
you needed in order to solve a puzzle in Syria, or something like that.
However, there are also no multiple paths or solutions — other than a few red
herrings here and there (don’t forget to give the demon statue at the end of
the game a smoking pipe, for a laugh), your trajectory should be quite
straightforward, meaning no real replay value. Occasionally, you get to make
a choice in one of your conversations, but these are included just for a bit
of atmosphere (as they are in LucasArts games), and even when one choice is
obviously «right» and the other just as obviously «wrong» — for instance,
letting the restaurant waitress drink alcohol after the explosion knocks her
out, while refusing her a drink leads to you getting some extra information —
making the «wrong» choice never penalizes you too seriously (the waitress
does not know anything particularly important anyway). Overall, the puzzles are more or less
what you’d expect from a game that takes Tintin
as its ideal — browse through the early volumes of Hergé’s works and
you will find out that the young Belgian reporter used more or less similar
(and sometimes, similarly ridiculous) tricks to get himself out of difficult
situations, except that he did not have to solve goddamn sliding puzzles in
real time. |
||||
|
Oh yes, baby. Broken
Sword: Shadow Of The Templars is not really a game about the Templars. It
does not teach you any significant moral lessons (other than that of staying
away from short-tempered goats). It will probably not make you love sliding
puzzles and chess compositions more than you already do (or do not). But if
it does not enchant you with the shapes, colors, manners, and speech patois
of its universe, it is then and only then that you will know it has truly
missed its mark — although, admittedly, I can very well understand how a
typically 21st century mindset might be wired to sweep all of that aesthetics
under the carpet, given its decidedly pre-1960s flavor. Although, to the best of my
understanding, the game is set to take place in modern times, the only things
about it that look «modern» are the occasional hi-tech gadget, the occasional
hi-tech vehicle, and the occasional jet plane. Cecil’s Paris is by no means
the Paris of 1996 — it is the Paris of Hergé’s Tintin from, say, the
1940s or the 1950s, and with strong echoes of an even earlier Paris, the
legendary mythical imperial Paris of Napoleon the Third or something like
that; at least, 90% of the architecture you see around you comes from the
times of Baron Haussmann — and since there is not a lot of traffic in the
game to impede your progress, you might as well use your imagination to draw
in a bunch of horse carriages to complete the picture. The people usually match the place —
police officers, such as the comedic Sergant Moue, walk around dressed like
pre-World War I gendarmes; Inspector Rosso (sic!) wears a classic trench coat and probably comes right out of
a Georges Simenon novel; representatives of the working class are all
middle-aged, grumbly, sarcastic, and heavily mustached; clowns and jugglers
provide street entertainment for children and parents alike; and, of course, Paris
is presented as a land of absolute racial purity, with every last store clerk
and ditch digger looking like the proud descendants of ten generations of
proud Norman farmers. Absolutely the same concerns every
other place in the game as well. Ireland is, of course, the place of
funny-talking stout little ale drinkers, gruff, burly, suspicious of
strangers, but potentially friendly if you can find the right touch. Syria is
one huge colonial bazaar, half of it occupied by stupid Western tourists and
the other half by crafty local entrepreneurs making money off stupid Western
tourists. Spain is the slowly dying territory of obsolete aristocratic legacy
— probably just what Paris would become without all the tourists to keep it
alive. And Scotland is the land of slightly more helpful and less stuffy Celts
than Ireland, green hills, and lonesome deserted castles that harbor
terrifying secrets. All of this could be very offensive —
and I have no doubt that, to many people, it is — if it were taken just a tad
more seriously than it is. But it is absolutely impossible to mistake the
fantasy world of Broken Sword for
something even remotely reminiscent of the real universe; it is no more
realistic, in fact, than the world of The
Witcher or even The Lord Of The
Rings, just as the world of Tintin
was not realistic when Hergé painted it on the pages of Le Petit Vingtième. Nor is
there any realism in the game’s caricaturesque villains — and even its
sympathetic figures are odd concoctions of a unique imagination. Naturally, this does not mean that
characters in the game are not relatable, or that their personalities and
their sense of humor cannot be connected to our own issues in this here day
and age — on the contrary, precisely the fact that Cecil allows himself to be
completely free of realistic conventions and go whenever he wishes to go is
responsible for most of the game’s atmosphere. When playing the game, by no
means should you be tempted to hurry it up and miss all the optional
conversations with ordinary people on the streets — this is what gives the
game most of its character, and this is usually where most of the hilarious
jokes are buried, too. (George: "I’d
be glad to talk with the Inspector, but I don’t want him working his psycho
weirdness on me". Sergeant Moue: "Ah, no, m’sieur. You are confusing the science of parapsychology with
witchcraft." George: "Oh
yeah? What’s the difference?" Sergeant Moue: "We don’t do sacrifices".) Arguably the most memorable NPC in the
game is Nejo, the Syrian street vendor boy who, instead of a country bumpkin,
unexpectedly turns out to be quite smart, sarcastic, and extremely well
educated in Anglo-American pop culture (even having learned his English from
tapes of Jeeves And Wooster),
meaning that the word «Templar», for him, is most closely associated with
works by Leslie Charteris. He is still a little stereotypical, a bit of a
cross between Disney’s Aladdin and the Artful Dodger, but his entire schtick
is symbolic of Cecil’s constant struggle to transcend stereotypes and
surprise the player with unpredictable personality features — a struggle in
which his failure-to-success ratio is about 50/50, but Nejo is his crowning
achievement in this line of work. If there is one thing in which Cecil’s work
is, after all, more modern than that of Hergé’s, it is in the sphere
of wittier and more educated dialog. (Nejo does have the honor, after all, of
posing the most brilliant question in the game — "What good is a Picasso, sir, if you cannot bounce it off a wall?") Much, if not most, of the game’s humor
is based on culture clashes: although the character of George Stobbart
certainly transcends the stereotype of the «uncultured American tourist», his
simply being American already activates the image in the minds of everybody
who he comes across (George: "Don’t
shoot! I’m innocent! I’m an American!" – Sergeant Moue: "Can’t make up your mind, huh?"),
and the poor guy has to carry that cross all the way until Syria, where he
finally is relieved of his burden by a couple of genuine uncultured American tourists (the ultra-annoying Duane and
Pearl Henderson, cursed with subsequent appearances in every single Broken Sword game). Meanwhile, Nico
has to carry the cross of posing as the French Femme Fatale, as deadly as she
is beautiful and all that, though most of the time she only gets to inflict
her beauty and deadliness (deadly humor, that is) on George (even in The Director’s Cut, her added parts
are mostly solitary). If there is one glaring flaw in Cecil’s
universe, it is the inability of its characters to engage with credibility
and heart in any sort of romantic scenarios. Admittedly, this, too, may be
inherited from Tintin (whose hero
was always notoriously asexual), but we are definitely introduced to the idea
that there is something between
George and Nico (there is even a third component in this triangle, an
obnoxious Templar scholar called André Lobineau, who keeps inserting
himself between the two lovebirds with the subtle insistence of an 18-year
old street thug) — yet Cecil is too afraid that any realistic romance will
break up our immersion into his fantasy world of old-fashioned irony, so
anything explicit is limited to a brief kiss at the end of the game, and (only
in The Director’s Cut) a final
picture of our heroes atop the Eiffel Tower (I mean, where else would a
Parisian journalist celebrate her affair with an American tourist?). The relationship between George and
Nico certainly brings to mind a similar cat-and-mouse relationship between
another famous adventure game couple — Gabriel Knight and Grace Nakimura — but
even though in Cecil’s universe the two actually do become lovers, unlike Gabriel and Grace (whose embarrassing
one-night stand in the third game ended in tragedy), it is unlikely that you
will ever feel a thing for the couple, whose union is more of an artificially
arranged engagement than a natural affair. Romance in Broken Sword is usually handled with the same old-fashioned irony
as anything else, which begs for the question of whether it wouldn’t have
been better to leave it out altogether. I mean, there is absolutely no need for George and Nico to develop
any feelings for one another — but perhaps Cecil thought that future fans
would crucify him if he did not make them do it, so he did make them do it.
Not that it’s a huge criticism or anything: the entire romantic line in the
game takes up maybe 1% of it. Nothing fatal. Ultimately, Broken Sword is all about the little things. One aspect of the
game that most players are not likely to explore is the option to try out all
your objects on all the NPCs with whom you are able to converse — in the Director’s Cut, this is made
convenient by having all of your inventory arranged as potential topics of
dialog (if a particular object has already been used up, it is shown blotted
out). The absolute majority of the resulting conversations are completely
unnecessary for progressing in the game, but it is often within them that you
will see concealed the most hilarious, most absurdist, most ironic, and most
dark-humored bits in the game. Show the Clown’s Nose to the stern Eastern
European professor, for instance, and he will tell you that "in my country, we have no use for
clowns... they were dealt with most severely in the last cultural cleansing"
(George: "What about the mimes?
Did you get them too?" Professor: "All gone. Our streets are mime free." George: "It sounds like heaven..."). Thus,
in one absolutely irrelevant exchange you get (a) an "I hate clowns and
mimes" joke, which is always nice to have if you hate clowns and mimes
(and you should), (b) a subtle reminder about the totalitarian practices of
the Eastern block (never mind that the game takes place in 1996 — remember,
it is an alternate universe in which Woodstock, Watergate, and the fall of
the Berlin Wall never really took place), and (c) who knows, maybe even a slight
jab at progressivism (embodied by George) which is so often ready to align
itself with totalitarianism whenever their interests intersect? Okay, (c)
might be taking things too far, but it’s still amusing that this silly bit of
dialog took my train of thought to that place. I do realize that a game whose primary
(or, at least, one of the primary) selling points is the ability to have
diverse conversations about drain cover lifting tools and to try out your
shiny electric buzzer on the hands of everybody in the neighborhood (not that
they ever fall for that, the bastards) may
be questionable as to whether it can have any lasting impact or replay value.
So do not take my word for it — if you have not done so already, just play it
for yourself, and see if the combined magic of a brightly colored idealistic
reflection of our planet imposed upon a lifting key as used by Parisian sewer
workers convinces you that Broken Sword
opens up a special path to perceiving the meaning of life... or maybe not. |
||||
|
Technical features |
||||
|
If you are creating a
dollhouse universe in the style of Tintin,
you’d better make sure that your visual art be up to par — otherwise, people
might not even catch on to the game’s legacy. Fortunately, by 1996 this was
technically possible. In terms of graphic resolution, Shadow Of The Templars was a huge improvement over Revolution’s
previous game, Beneath A Steel Sky
(640x480 vs. the latter’s 320x200), and while de-pixelation and upscaling in The Director’s Cut made it look even
better, I must say that I have few qualms about the way the original looked;
640x480 can work wonders for 2D comic-cartoon style, and it actually did for
both of the first two games in the series. (Then they switched to 3D, and
everything began to suck, but let us not get too far ahead). More precisely,
the resolution gives you exactly
the kind of detalisation you need to match the spirit of a colorful Belgian
comic book circa 1950 — anything less and you’re digitally screwed, anything
more and you begin going for extra realism which you don’t really need. Cecil’s art team did a fantastic job
bringing to life his idealistic fantasies. The bright colors of an autumnal
Paris, all brown and red and sepia; the lush green of Ireland and Scotland;
the yellow sands of the Syrian desert — the game is visually resplendent in a
way that no Sierra or LucasArts had a proper chance to be. The level of
detail is incredible — the leaves, the cracks in the pavement, the small
blemishes in old wall paint, the chimney smoke, the rich interiors in
Parisian luxury apartments and ethnographic museums, the overturned chairs
and broken lamps after the cafe explosion, everything looks like it was drawn
straight from the heart, making the fantasy world fully believable and well
worth escaping into, rather than from. The cartoonish characters are also
rendered sympathetically; higher resolution allows them to have changing
animated facial expressions and realistic walks across the screen, as well as
be scalable depending on their distance from the player. George is a dashing
young fellow (though, strangely enough, a bit hunchbacked) looking precisely
like an intelligent American
tourist should; meanwhile, Nico has the smoothest and sexiest walk of any
female protagonist in an adventure game up to that time (and much later, for
that matter, since most adventure games would very soon be in 3D, and it
would take a looooong time before
3D characters in adventure games would begin walking without suffering from
quantum disorder). One significant difference between the
original version and The Director’s Cut
concerns the fate of close-ups. In the original game, large images of
characters were only present during occasional phone conversations, when
George and his phone partner would loom over the entire screen; otherwise,
conversation would simply be illustrated with large subtitles over the
characters’ heads. In The Director’s
Cut, every time you strike up a dialog with somebody, you get small
cut-out profiles of the characters near the top of the screen, allowing you
to closely scrutinize their facial expressions — strange enough, the profiles
are not animated (was there not enough budget to make them move their
mouths?). However, phone conversations, like everything else, are also now
represented by cut-out profiles rather than full-screen images, which, I
think, was a mistake — there’s no reason we can never look at a full-screen
George Stobbart. Some of the game’s most climactic
events are transferred to animated cutscenes — a limited number of cartoon
videos with predictably low quality (unfortunately, they were not properly
remastered for The Director’s Cut)
which still do a good job of more closely familiarizing us with the principal
characters, as well as bring in bits of speedy and turbulent action, making
the generally static game more lively. The
Director’s Cut throws in even more of these, particularly in Nico’s
opening segment and during the ending (where we have that tacky romantic
scene with Nico and George atop the Eiffel Tower), but while they are
definitely more hi-res, they also look surprisingly more stiff and
comic-bookish than the little animated sequences designed by the original
team (this is probably the biggest stylistic incongruence between the
original game and the new edition). Overall, I think it would not be much
of an exaggeration to state that Shadow
Of The Templars is simply one of the most beautiful, most lovingly
crafted 2D adventure games of all time. The uniqueness of its art logically
stems from the uniqueness of the combination of its components — the
«mythical realism» of Ye Olde Dear Europe as represented by a classic comic
book drawing style in relatively high resolution. Other games would give you
one or the other part of this ensemble, but never all of it at once. I mean —
where else have you seen Paris pictured quite like that? Nowhere, that’s where. |
||||
|
For all the beauty of Shadow’s visuals, there was
surprisingly little work done on the music soundtrack. You would probably
think that a representation of semi-mythical quasi-1950s Paris would scream for some Edith Piaf or, at
least, some instrumental cabaret music; but, apparently, authentic French
music was too expensive to license, and nobody at Revolution Software could
compose French music in the first place. The hired composer for this game was
Australian-born Barrington Pheloung, whose chief claim to fame was incidental
music to the British detective series Inspector
Morse; for Broken Sword, most
of the music was quite incidental, as well, as the themes are usually
delivered in short, concentrated bursts at the beginning of the scene, and
then tend to be replayed after a carefully measured out period of silence. I certainly do not hold the
opinion that, with the arrival of proper sound cards, all games should have
music playing at all times — honestly, both adventure games and RPGs that do
that often tend to get on your nerves, replaying the same theme over and over
while you are stuck over a puzzle. So there is nothing wrong with much of Broken Sword taking place in relative
silence, with only marginal sound effects like chirping birds and whistling
wind accompanying the action (or lack of it). The problem is, some interesting, evocative, and
memorable music themes would be nice to have, and there are none. Pretty much
everything that plays out is just sweet background phonation, usually
orchestrated. Even the Syrian themes do not sound particularly mid-Eastern,
and the Irish flavor is only represented by an annoying fiddle part churned
out by a fiddler in the pub. The Director’s Cut fares even worse in this respect: for some of the new segments,
as well as Nico’s radio station at her apartment and the final titles,
Revolution contracted the services of jazz guitarist Miles Gilderdale and
young soul vocalist Jade Herbert. While both of them are obviously competent
(though nothing too special to my ears), this new music does not
stylistically fit in with the rest of the game at all — it is so immersion-breaking that I’d rather turn the
sound off altogether (fortunately, nobody is obliging you to turn on that
radio, and those final credits... who watches them anyway?). If the music in general is
a disappointment, the voice cast certainly is not, though, again, unlike the
graphic art, it is not outstanding. George is voiced by Rolf Saxon, a TV and stage
actor whose role in all five Broken
Sword games still remains his chief claim to fame; Saxon brings in just
the right amount of effort to make his Stobbart a little ironic, a little
naïve, a tad cynical and a tad idealistic — more or less the same
psychotype as Tintin, except that George is also a bit more attracted by the
opposite sex. Nico, who, unfortunately, did not have the luxury of being
voiced by the same actress throughout the game, is here represented by Hazel
Ellerby, to whom falls the task of also making her both cynical and
idealistic at the same time while always maintaining a heavy French accent —
a job that she does reasonably well. Most of the other actors do
a solid job as well, although they usually just latch onto the assigned
stereotypes, delivering the required combinations of French / Irish / Spanish
etc. accents with specific emotional states — the police inspector has to be
Suspicious about everything, the British lady has to be Victorian-Eccentric,
the East European professor has to be Stern, the Syrian driver has to be
Eastern-Suave etc. I do not remember any specific voice part that would
really stand out or defy expectations... well, maybe Fleur, the clairvoyant
lady selling flowers and telling fortunes next to Nico’s doorstep, does a
slightly more subtle and creepy job than the rest (she is voiced by Rachel
Atkins, whom most people now probably know as Dolores Umbridge from the Harry Potter movies). But on the
whole, this is precisely what you should be getting — all of these characters
were conceived as fixed stereotypes, and trying to give them Shakesperian
depth would inevitably lead to failure. |
||||
|
Interface Although the gameplay
mechanics of Broken Sword do not
exactly shatter the foundational principles of point-and-click adventures,
Cecil clearly took some time aside to think about design. For the standard
playing mode, he chose the two-option mode — in the original game, you could
switch between «Look» and «Pick up / Operate» options, while in The Director’s Cut you just have a
single-shaped mouse cursor hovering over the object, which you can click on
with the left mouse button to «Operate» it or with the right mouse button to
get a description of it (this actually took me a bit of time to discover
without reading the instructions — for the first hour of the game, I was
stupidly not even aware that I could «Look» at anything, despite the cursor
icon consisting of two parts, a moving «Cogwheel» for operations and a
blinking «Eye» for inspection). This certainly limits your playing options,
but at least it’s a little better than Sierra’s option-less programming of
the mouse cursor for most of its games since King’s Quest VII. Somewhat more innovative is the dialog
system, which is cleverly integrated with your inventory window — after the
initial conversation with the nearby NPC is over, you are given a list of
potential topics for discussion, all of them represented by icons rather than
words (arranged in a row at the top of the screen in the original game, and
in a special pop-up window in the remake). Already explored topics are either
shaded out or removed to save you from clicking on them again. Somewhat
confusing is the fact that some topics can actually be explored twice or even
thrice, but in order to do that you have to close the window and strike the
conversation up again, which some players may probably forget to do
(admittedly, most of these second-time options are laconic and optional). This design is certainly more
convenient than, for instance, a typical Sierra game like Gabriel Knight, where, in order to get
an opinion on or a reaction to any object from your inventory, you had to
open the inventory window, select the object, close the window, click the
object on the NPC, then rinse and repeat for all other items in your
inventory without knowing which ones are bound to trigger a generic "you
can’t do that" response and which ones will be significant or at least
hilarious. On the other hand, you could certainly argue that this makes the
game more predictable and less challenging. God be your judge in the matter. The mechanics for solving the game’s
tile, code, and other such puzzles are pretty self-explanatory and need no
comment — if you like these puzzles, you won’t be frustrated by their
implementation, and if you do not, no amount of smooth mouse control will
save the day. Saving and restoring is pretty easy and commonly available,
though the amount of save slots is limited (which is not a big problem
anyway, considering that you cannot get hopelessly stuck or hopelessly dead).
And since all the locations in the game are conveniently chopped up into
small clusters, joined by an insta-travel map, you won’t ever have to worry
about tedious backtracking upon forgetting to pick something from somewhere.
In short, Charles Cecil takes real good care of his customers! Apparently, The Director’s Cut takes even more care of its customers with an
integrated hint system which, honestly, I never used (whenever I do get
stuck, I just find a walkthrough — yes, I’m totally a renegade these days
when it comes to adventure gaming). There are other subtle ways as well in
which it simplifies the game (you can find many a grumble from old veterans
of the series on the Web), but I still cannot bring myself to openly
recommend the original over the remake — not that you are ever forced to make
a choice, since most places where you can buy the game today offer both
versions bundled together, with the original as a free bonus. |
||||
|
Although, as I have already pointed out, Shadow Of The Templars has pretty much become an unshakable part
of the gaming canon (no list of best-of adventure games of all time ever
dares to cut it out), surprisingly few people go to the trouble of trying to
explain what precisely it is about the game that makes it so endearing. The
cartoon art? The jokes? The tile puzzles? The, uh, adventure? We do have
hundreds of marketed titles that do all that, don’t we? Almost nobody points
out the aesthetics of the game as
its chief selling point — maybe, at least in part, because delving in deep
discussions of the game’s aesthetics can actually lead you out into somewhat
dangerous waters. Yet, want it or not, this game is all about aesthetics —
take Cecil’s imaginary, mythical, pre-modern take on the universe out of the
game, and you are left with a painfully average, clichéd, predictable
mystery whose only intrigue will come from purely mechanical puzzle solving. Even
when it was originally released, back in 1996, the game was not so much
behind its time or ahead of its time as it was out of its time — which is, kinda sorta, the precise thing that
unites it with Gabriel Knight, whose
author (Jane Jensen) has a lot in common with Charles Cecil, despite the many
formal and official differences between George Stobbart and the
Schattenjäger. Gabriel Knight
is a game steeped in tragedy; Broken
Sword is a comedic series. Gabriel
Knight wants you to care about its characters; Broken Sword wants you to admire the stylish coolness of its
characters. Both series, however, want to place you straight in the middle of
an alternate version of our universe — a little brighter, cleaner, and more
old-fashioned on the surface, but also a little darker and more mysterious on
the underside, dealing with the timeless battle of good against evil that is
only tangentially related to modern events. It
would not be right to state that Cecil does not at all want you to take his
universe seriously, though — it’s just that any of the depth in this game has
to be uncovered from its witty jokes, once you separate them from the chaff
of the corny ones. Shadow Of The
Templars boasts a level of sharpness that Cecil would never be able to
repeat — in fact, most of the subsequent games in the series feel more like
reflections of impressions from their average players and reviewers rather
than reflections of the same vision that the series’ creator had in store for
the first and best title. Lightweight as it is, there are many, many points
in the game that might make you want to stop and think, and find much tighter
parallels between this imaginary existence and the actual world we live in
than you thought there were at first. And it is for these parallels, not for
the goat challenge or the sliding tile puzzles, that the game is truly
replayable in our time, or, presumably, any time that might follow. |
||||
