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Studio: |
Revolution
Software |
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Designer(s): |
Charles
Cecil |
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Part of series: |
Broken
Sword |
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Release: |
October 17, 1997 (original) / September 7, 2010 (Remastered) |
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Main credits: |
Producers: Steve Ince, Michael Merren |
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Useful links: |
Complete
playthrough (Remastered; 6 parts, 380
mins.) |
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The full work cycle on Broken Sword: The Shadow Of The Templars,
the game that truly made Revolution Software into a household name in the
adventure game industry, took almost four years — starting with Charles Cecil’s
research on the Templars that he did in Paris in 1992 and ending with the
game’s final shipping in the fall of 1996. In comparison, work on its
immediate sequel, The Smoking Mirror,
was all begun and completed in less than one year — a mammoth rush undertaken
in the wake of Shadow’s critical
and commercial success, and one that Cecil probably regrets in hindsight (at
least, judging by the many improvements introduced in the Remastered edition 13 years later). Of course, with most of the framework
for the franchise already worked out for the previous game, the technical
amount of work to be done was much smaller. More or less the same gameplay
interface working on the same engine; the same graphic artists applying the
same principles; the same composer and (at least some of) the same voice cast
— The Smoking Mirror made
absolutely no pretense at breaking any new ground that had not already been
broken in Shadow. Even so, just a
bare assessment of the length of the game, which is about at least one quarter
shorter than its predecessor (probably one third shorter if you count the
expanded Director’s Edition, though
this would be cheating), clearly shows that Cecil was not as heavily invested
in the story as he was the first time around, and that, unfortunately, it was
rushed out more to appease the hungry newborn fan community of Broken Sword than the insatiable
artistic drive of the franchise’s father. However, the worst thing about Smoking Mirror — a contextual thing,
since the game itself is not that bad — is not the time rush that led to many
of its imperfections. The worst thing is that with Smoking Mirror, Broken
Sword became a limited formula, locked in onto itself, with almost no
capacity of transcending its self-imposed limitations; meanwhile, Revolution
Software would go on to lose any moral rights to that proud moniker,
essentially becoming a predictable conveyor belt for the never-ending Adventures of George Stobbart and Nicole
Collard. By 1996, the company had three successful game titles to its
name — an original fantasy story (Lure
Of The Temptress), an original dystopian sci-fi parable (Beneath A Steel Sky), and an equally
original tale of mystery and adventure (Shadow
Of The Templars). Of the seven games released by Revolution in between
1997 and 2020, a whoppin’ four
would be in the Broken Sword
series, and the other three would be quickly forgotten because they were not Broken Sword games anyway. One could reasonably object that, at
least in theory, there is nothing wrong with that — some artists begin by
trying out different ideas and even different paradigms, then eventually
settle into the one groove that they feel is really them, and milk it to their and their fans’ hearts’ desire; think
George Lucas and Star Wars, or,
heck, even Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes. However, at their best these
fictional universes are capable of expanding both in width and in depth,
adding new, sometimes unpredictable, strokes to their characters, finding
answers to previously unanswered questions, and staying, as best as they can,
in touch with changing times. Heck, even Tintin,
which we might safely reguard as the main spiritual influence of the Broken Sword series, underwent a whole
set of metamorphoses in the 50 years of its existence, never treating the
universe as a vacuum but, instead, always finding inspiration in what went on
around for its stories, from stunning archaeological discoveries to World War
II to the space race. Alas, this is not the direction that
Cecil chose for the Broken Sword
franchise. At least Shadow Of The
Templars was loosely based on the conspirological nonsense recently
published in Holy Blood, Holy Grail
— this does not make the game specially relevant for modern times, but at
least provides a weak link to the world outside of Broken Sword’s fictional universe. With Smoking Mirror, which placed most of the action in a fictional
version of Central America, the franchise became an exercise in full-time
escapism, with no connections whatsoever to anything outside your window and
with the exact same formula applied in exactly the same ways to its
fixed-in-stone, never-evolving title characters, the always ironic, but
positive George Stobbart, and the always cool and impenetrable Nico.
Apparently, it was a formula that worked for the fans — who typically
preferred to complain about the technical issues of the games, such as the
unfortunate switch to 3D for the third and fourth installment — but if we are
here to primarily evaluate these titles on the strength of their
world-building and story-crafting techniques, I am afraid the fans will have
to swallow some bitter pills. From what I can gather based on a
skimpy Wikipedia summary and on a brief perusal of several surviving reviews,
the original game had a more or less mixed critical reception, at the very
least, incomparable to the level of admiration flung at the first title —
though most of the criticisms concerned the relative shortness of the game
and the easiness of its puzzles rather than the bigger issues at the heart of
the franchise. Nevertheless, it sold quite well, demonstrating that Broken Sword had earned itself a
stable niche position and could allow itself to go the Star Wars or the James Bond
route — no matter what kind of crap you come up with, someone is going to eat it up, because Big Brand and all. (I
mean, had Ken Williams not made the rash decision to sell Sierra to a bunch
of crooks, we would probably get new King’s
Quests every couple of years, too). I write all this in an atmosphere of
light sadness rather than acute hatred: on the whole, I enjoyed playing The Smoking Mirror (which would be
harder to say about the two games that followed), and if you exhaust
everything that it has to offer, rather than just stick to the core story, it
will be clear that Cecil’s wit and humor still resides in many of its pores.
Together with its beautiful art style, now tested on a series of entirely new
locations, and a few really cool (though sometimes abused) puzzles, this
allows not to write off Smoking Mirror
as a complete disaster, but rather to accept it as an inevitably predictable
disappointment. People are weak by nature, and only a few of them are capable
of producing masterpiece after masterpiece, permanently topping themselves in
a race with their own abilities. And Charles Cecil is, after all, just a
person — at the very least, we may be sure that he never secretly picked up
the Sword of Baphomet for himself. (Then again, maybe he did, and this is precisely why all of his subsequent output looks
as if it’s been put under a curse). |
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Content evaluation |
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One might think that it would be hard,
if at all possible, to come up with a storyline even more old-fashioned than that of Shadow Of The Templars — but that would mean grossly
underestimating the brain cogs of Charles Cecil. Leaving aside the Templar
legends for a while, the man shifted his attention to pre-Columbian America
(a subject that had also been explored by Hergé in such Tintin adventures as The Seven Crystal Balls and Prisoners Of The Sun) and put together
a rather messy save-the-world story, playing fast and loose with chunks of Mesoamerican
mythology. Any beginning Mesoamericanist, or, in
fact, just about anybody with access to encyclopaedic information will
quickly discover that «fast and loose» might actually be an understatement. The Smoking Mirror is, in fact, the
correct English translation of the name Tezcatlipoca — the evil deity which
acts as our heroes’ principal behind-the-scene antagonist; trapped inside a
mirror with the power of three magical Mayan stones, the bad dude is supposed
to remain there forever, but after the stones get plundered by Spanish
conquistadors and scattered all over the world, it is only a matter of time
before a nefarious organization comes up with a plan to retrieve them and use
their power to release Tezcatlipoca into this world... which means, of
course, that it is up to George Stobbart and Nico Collard to get the stones
before the competition does and make sure that the demonic force of Tezcatlipoca
remains confined for eternity. It hardly matters, of course, that,
although the stones are always called «Mayan» and George learns all about
their history in a supposedly «Mayan» village from a «Mayan» shaman, the name
Tezcatlipoca is actually Nahuatl in
origin, and the deity is a product of Aztec, not Mayan, culture. Nor does it
matter that he was called the Smoking
Mirror not because he was imprisoned in a smoking mirror (actually, the
mirror in the game is smoking!),
but because of his associations with obsidian, the mineral used for making
mirrors in various Mesoamerican cultures. Nor
does it matter that Tezcatlipoca, the Aztecan deity, was hardly the
Mesoamerican analog of the Anti-Christ, but rather one of the most revered
figures of the pantheon — sure, he demanded human sacrifice like any other
self-respecting Aztecan god, but only for the greater good, you know. Turning
the poor guy into an embodiment of pure evil would be like discovering that
Benjamin Franklin had been a secret agent of the British Crown all through
the Revolutionary War. Had the game been released a couple of
decades later, and had it been
something more than a humble point-and-click adventure title, with a limited
fanbase and scarce media coverage, The
Smoking Mirror would have probably been lambasted and destroyed for its
cartoonish and clichéd coverage (or «appropriation», if you want to
use a trendy word) of Native American cultures; not even Hergé,
Cecil’s idol, could allow himself to distort historical and cultural reality
so much while sending Tintin all around the globe to explore all sorts of
exotic civilizations. Surprisingly, Cecil got away with that — most of the
reviews I have seen for the game barely even mention the ridiculous twists of
the plot and the audacious handling of native culture elements, preferring to
save their critical arrows for the more technical aspects. (I do suppose that
most of the reviewers would hardly be able to suspect that «Tezcatlipoca»
does not sound particularly Mayan). That said, I do not believe there was
any intentional harm done in the matter, and you gotta give credit for the
creative reinterpretation of Tezcatlipoca’s name, at least. If there really
is a major quibble I have with Cecil’s story, it is probably the introduction
of a supernatural component. The Shadow
Of The Templars, even if it constantly toyed with the idea of demonic
forces, ultimately remained on the realistic side: even the final climactic
confrontation somehow managed to avoid having us meet face-to-face with
Baphomet, implying that, perhaps, all of that evil still lurks within the
hearts of men rather than is injected into them by mythical authority
figures. The Smoking Mirror manages
to hold on to the «realistic» model for most of its duration as well, but at
the end Cecil just cannot resist the temptation of showing us that
Tezcatlipoca is real, if only for
just a few seconds — yet these few seconds are enough to completely overhaul
the genre of his creation. This trend would be continued (to even more
absurdity) into all three following games in the series as well. This decision, in my opinion, is quite
clumsy — about as clumsy as writing five acts of a romantic comedy and an
epilogue in which all the leading characters kill themselves. Like its
predecessor, The Smoking Mirror is
essentially a comedic game, all the heroes in which exist mainly for you to
laugh off their stereotypical features and funny accents; when the very few
last minutes of the experience tell you that you have really been saving the world from destruction all this time, you
kind of feel like somebody who’s just been handed a million dollars for
helping a little old lady cross the street (well, I mean the «no shit» part
of that feeling, not the «holy moly I’m rich» aspect of it). That’s
definitely not the way it happened in Tintin. Admittedly, it is hard to get truly
offended at an ending which is less than two minutes long out of a game that
takes six hours of pure gameplay. The action itself, this time around, rather
quickly gets Nico and George out of Paris — first, to Marseilles where Nico
was abducted, then to the fictional town of Quaramonte in Central America,
then to an island in the Caribbean (with Nico making her own brief detour to
the British Museum), and finally back to Central American jungle. Overall,
the pacing is quicker and more action-packed — unlike the rather leisurely
opening of Shadow, here you find
yourself in a serious drag right from the start, where George finds himself
clubbed, tied to a chair, and left inside a burning house with a huge
venomous spider in front of him all at
once. Unfortunately, all this speed and action largely come at the
expense of what made the Broken Sword
games worth playing in the first place — colorful interaction with colorful
characters. The differences are mainly quantitative
rather than qualitative: you do spend most of your time alternating between
tense action sequences, tricky puzzle-solving, and weird dialog with corny
NPCs, but there is simply much less of the latter than there used to be, with
the resulting impression that the focus had somewhat shifted to «game» from
«interactive world». Nevertheless, Cecil still manages to introduce a bunch
of cleverly drawn parodic characters, such as the pretentious art critic
Hector Laine (who would go on to have a much bigger part in The Serpent’s Curse); the snarky and
impertinent tomboy gal Emily Ketch, probably modeled after Pippi
Longstocking; and the braindead bunch of Hollywood actors that George
encounters in the least expected of his travel locations. Arguably the best segment of the entire
game takes place in Quaramonte, a setting which Cecil uses to depict, in a
rush of satirical inspiration, the classic conflict between Spanish military
bureaucracy and the oppressed population of peasants and natives in a typical
banana republic, where all indigenous music has been officially banned and
replaced by «easy listening», all local activities are determined by the will
of the sleazy and suave General Raoul Grasiento, and all the actions of
General Raoul are further controlled by his power-hungry mother
(«Señora la Presidente»). The entire topic, I think, might have also
been picked up by Cecil from his fond memories of Tintin (Hergé had explored Latin American politics many
times, from The Broken Ear back in
1935 and all the way to Tintin and the
Picaros forty years later), but he was able to put his own spin on it;
the relations between General Grasiento and his mother, the ultimate control
freak, go a long way toward exposing and ridiculing the dictatorial
psychology of those kinds of leaders. Unfortunately, the exact same
Quaramonte section, in addition to several other nice story elements (such as
the subtle jab at gender reversal strategies with the character of Conchita
Garcia, the male-hating president of the local Mining Company who makes all
her male employees sit in their offices without their pants on), also
introduces a major bane of all the Broken
Sword sequels — returning characters with their running gags. In
Quaramonte, George comes face-to-face with Duane and Pearl Henderson, the
obnoxious couple of American tourists which he had previously encountered in
Syria — and, sure enough, they remain as obnoxious as ever, because this is
precisely the reason for which they have been introduced (to always be
exactly the same). I don’t know about you, of course, but to me, the first
set of Duane-centered jokes was more than enough, and I could easily do
without the predictability of the second. Again, this problem would become
seriously worse over time, as the number of memorable characters multiplied
and more and more of them needed to make their own comebacks — but even this
single segment is disappointing, just because it so forcefully reminds you
that what you are dealing with here is formula. Also, more and more side branches of
the story make less and less sense: as much as I enjoy the character of Emily
Ketch (with the extra sinister twist of her probably meant to be an actual ghost), the entire story of her
aunts Mina and Frost and their being swindled by a crooked surveyor feels
artificial, unfunny, and downright stupid all the way to its conclusion (with
the surveyor left dangling on a flagpole and the offended sisters tickling
him as punishment). More and more of these lines simply appear as contrived
fodder for throwing in a few extra puzzles, rather than contributing anything
to the main story or to the overall quirkiness of the Broken Sword universe. Still, on the whole, at least the
general number of the new characters vastly overrides the number of those
returning, and the general quality of Cecil’s dialog remains sharp. The
romantic side of the story was almost completely cut out: even if George does
refer to Nico as «his girlfriend», gets jealous about her feelings for the
fanfaron André Lobineau (another character who should have been left
behind in the first game) and seemingly cares for her after she suffers an
accident in the Central American jungle, this is about as far as it gets,
with most of the dynamic duo’s relations taking on a strictly business
nature. This I count as a strong side of the proceedings — the less sentiment
in a Broken Sword game, the better,
no? |
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Given that the game follows the Shadow formula quite precisely, and
that both games run on the exact same Virtual Theatre engine, designed by
Revolution Software for all of its original 2D titles, it is hardly
surprising that the basic mechanics of the puzzles in this game remains
exactly the same, as is its overall ratio of object-based «classic adventure»
puzzles to various brain-wrecking challenges of the «prove your IQ» variety... ...well, actually, correction: the only
puzzles of the latter type are two specific challenges that you encounter
near the end of the game (actually, now that I think of it, a great many such
challenges in Shadow Of The Templars
were actually only added in with The
Director’s Cut, for the Nico-driven segments of the story). One — where,
as George, you have to progress through a little maze by pushing levers to
open and close doors — is abysmally tedious. The other, where you have to, as
Nico, open yet another passage by putting together complex symbols out of
smaller constituents, is much more fun, with but one caveat — once you have
figured out the basic principle of how it works, the rest of the puzzle,
where you just have to turn more and more wheels and click more and more
panels, quickly becomes just as tedious. (Something that would become a
common problem in the rest of the games as well — for some reason, Cecil’s
puzzles always tend to mix together intellectual challenge, fun, and boring
grind). As for the regular puzzles, there is
not much to comment on. Having probably learned from the Goat Puzzle scandal
not to make things too confusing
for the player, Cecil usually refrains from tricks such as time-based puzzles
for The Smoking Mirror, and this
means that the game may be completed in a reasonably short time without the
need for a walkthrough. In his interviews, Cecil rarely forgets to mention
how much emphasis he always placed on realism in his puzzles, but, of course,
he exaggerates: the more realistic a certain puzzle is in a point-and-click
adventure game, the easier it is for even a complete dunce to solve it, and
if all the puzzles in the game were «realistic», it wouldn’t even be a game.
So, for instance, the puzzle where you have to get a stubborn stuntsman to do
his stunt by setting a swarm of angry bees on him is not particularly
realistic, but it is fairly logical, and just a tiny bit more complicated
than the rest of them. On the whole, as long as you dutifully
explore all the hotspots on the screen, talk to characters on all topics, and
learn how to combine objects in your inventory, you have nothing to worry
about. Arguably the most difficult challenge is finding the hidden Easter
Eggs in the game, one of which (when playing as Nico in the London
Underground), when triggered, will take you to a short (and humorously
horrific) scene in the parallel universe of Revolution’s Beneath A Steel Sky ("they don’t make animations like that anymore", remarks Nico as
she resumes her questing). On another occasion, in a subtle tribute to the
Goat Puzzle, George can actually have a short talk with a real live goat in
Quaramonte — and again, both of the eggs can be triggered simply by
experimenting on different targets with different objects, no crazyass
unguessable key combination required. Just a friendly reminder that trying
out really absurd combinations remains a requirement in this game if you do
not just want to beat it, but want to try your best to experience it as an
art form. (Actually, speaking of Easter eggs,
there is another way to bypass the tedious wheeling and clicking of the door
puzzle in the Maya temple — but since it involves finding a particular hidden
hotspot, this is one you shall probably never guess without specific hints.
It is also a bit embarrassing for poor Nico.) |
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On its own, the world of The Smoking Mirror is not half-bad,
but when compared to its predecessor, it becomes clear that this time around,
as it often happens with sequels, Cecil’s strategy is more about advancing
the plot than about atmospheric world-building. The decision to move most of
the action out of Paris was understandable — like Tintin, George Stobbart is
expected to travel all over the world in order to expose it to his awesome
Stobbartness; but neither Cecil himself, nor anybody in his team manage to
display as much love for any other location (or even a mythologized version
of those locations).
George’s brief stay at Paris at least allows you to revisit Place Montfauçon
from the previous game, where you can meet up with yet another old
acquaintance, but this is no more than just a brief nostalgic jab. Your next step is Marseilles, which could
have been an opportunity to expand the game’s French palette with seaport
elements, but is instead served up very pragmatically — there is only one
small dock area with one solitary watchman and his dog; you can chat the
watchman up a bit, but you won’t get much out of him, and once you get past
him, all you have to do is rescue Nico from a nearby warehouse. Although the
graphics are pretty and the watchman is a suitably gruff fellow, this is not
really an area which one would love to explore and admire — just a brief stop
on your way elsewhere. And this sets up the entire scene: you move from place
to place, most of which have their clearly defined roles and functions but
rarely, if ever, can be appreciated as anything special. The only exception to this rule, which
I already mentioned, is the town of Quaramonte. Although, like all other
locations in the game, this one is also quite small, its central square,
swarming with merchants, artisans, musicians, policemen, and even a talking
goat, manages to come alive, and it is extremely
recommended to make a full tour of the place before proceeding to investigate
the suspicious Professor Oubier and confront the nefarious General Graciente.
Actually, this is your last chance to properly mingle: the Mayan village is
totally restricted to its loquatious, but largely perfunctory shaman, and
Ketch’s Landing in the Caribbean, where George spends most of the second half
of the game, is fairly solitary as well. They are all prettily painted, for
sure, but nothing really comes alive as successfully as that little square in
Quaramonte. And what about the dialog, which was
the leading source of entertainment, inspiration, and sometimes even
education in Shadow Of The Templars?
Well — as long as the game does not fall prey to the curse of running gags
(which it does every time that Duane Henderson appears on the horizon), the
dialog manages to retain some of that value, yet on the whole, I would
qualify the writing as a noticeable step down from the quality of Shadow, at least in that there are
few, if any, lines, quips, aphorisms, retorts as memorable as some of the
stuff you can get from Sergeant Moue or the Syrian boy Nejo in the original
game. As I said, there are some well written characters, but no particularly great characters — and the game rarely
gets more funny than, say, the girl Emily Ketch constantly mispronouncing
George’s name as ‘Jaws’, or the vapor-brained Hollywood actor on Zombie
Island called ‘Haiku McEwan’ because "when I was born I was so small and
perfectly formed I reminded my mother of a Japanese poem". Well, huh,
okay, whatever you say. It’s not terrible dialog, for sure — you’d have to wait until the third
game in the series for some truly serious embarrassments — but I was surprised to still see Cecil
credited as primary writer, because I could have sworn that the dip in
quality would be most easily explained by the emergence of a different
writing team, which was not the case, so, apparently, it was just a matter of
rushing through the game and not taking the time to think things out
properly. The end result is the same, however: The Smoking Mirror works better as a game — and not a great game
at that — than it does as a natural, meaningful, and convincing expansion of
the wond’rous quirky little universe of Broken
Sword. |
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Technical features |
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The art team for the second
game remained largely the same as for the first one, and since the
comical-cartoonish 2D style was to be retained, The Smoking Mirror generally looks the same way as its
predecessor — and quality
of the art is one aspect of the game where I would be hard pressed to lodge a
complaint. The bright colors, the lighting and shadows, the detalization
(that market at Quaramonte almost looks more appetizing than any actual fruit
market I’d seen!), everything looks top notch — from the dark and dreary dock
areas of Marseilles to the lush green tropics of Zombie Island. I must state, however, that I have only
played the Remastered edition of
the game; unlike The Director’s Cut
of Shadow Of The Templars, Cecil
and Co. have not bothered expanding it with too much extra content, but they
did add support of higher resolutions, depixelating the original graphics and
cleaning them up for the new, more demanding generation of players. The most
visible difference, however, are the close-up mugs of characters added during
dialog — not only are they now fully animated (it was weird seeing them talk
in The Director’s Cut without
moving their lips), but they are clearly drawn at higher resolutions from the
start, and thus contrast somewhat uncomfortably with the original graphics
(much like the hi-res VGA character cutouts in King’s Quest VI looked oddly out of place against the lo-res
sprites waddling across the screen). But this is just a kind of temporary
weirdness to which you can quickly get used. As a humorous side note, I should
probably remark that for the second game, George and Nico actually change
their clothes depending on their location (more precisely, on the climate of
their location) — three different outfits for Nico, and two for George. I am
not a big fan of their Central American / Caribbean garb — Nico in green
pants and an undershirt kind of loses all her femme fatale mystique, and George in his yellow shirt, shorts,
and shades looks too much like a clueless tourist, but I guess it was all
intentional. Want it or not, even Tintin used to change clothes to adapt, and
watching George wear the exact same green suit to Syria as he wore in Paris did seem a bit weird, particularly if
you’re a deep-thinking clothes man. |
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Sound Similarly to the graphics,
sound in Broken Sword II follows
the exact same principles as in the first game. The main soundtrack is once
again by Barrington Pheloung, and once again it consists of mostly short,
unintrusive, ambient-ish compositions that spring up as you enter a
particular location, die down, then reemerge after a while when you are least
expecting them. Given that this time around, most of the action takes place
in «exotic» locations, the themes may have a bit of Mexican flavor to them,
or a bit of Caribbean, which makes the overall atmosphere more reliable and
believable, but certainly does not make the themes into masterpieces. (I have
seen reviews which were all but gushing with praise for the soundtrack to
both games, but I do not really get it — The
Witcher 3 is a game that gets its ambient-ish soundtrack right; Broken Sword simply works better
because it has a soundtrack, but it is not a soundtrack that is going to
haunt you after the game is over). The only actual «song»
specially composed for the game is a rather idiotic and cloying calypso tune
that is first heard as an instrumental composition when George arrives at
Ketch’s Landing (or was that Zombie Island? really don’t remember) and then,
unfortunately, as a fully voiced song, performed by a certain Bob Sekar,
under the title "Happiness Is An Inside Job" at the end of the
game. The worst thing about it is that it simply does not suit the overall mood of the game — it could be
suitable enough at the end of, say, some dumb teenage romance comedy taking
place in the Bahamas, that kind of thing (lots of sun, cocktails, bikini-clad
girls at the beach, dirty sex jokes, you know the drill). But when it comes
at you right after you have just saved the world from destruction by an evil
Mayan deity with an Aztec name... well, it’s like winning top prize for an
essay on string theory and receiving it from the jury to the grand sound of
Imagine Dragons. Not much can be said about
the voice acting, either, all of which is quite up to the standards of Shadow Of The Templars, yet those
standards were never all that high in the first place. Importantly, Rolf
Saxon returns to reprise the role of George, which pretty much cemented this
function — he would return again as Stobbart for the entire duration of the
series, merging with the character the same way that Dominic Armato would
merge with Guybrush Threepwood; however, since the game added almost nothing
by way of developing George Stobbart as a character, so was nothing in
particular added to Saxon’s performance. On the other hand, the voice actress
for Nico (Hazel Ellerby) was replaced by Jennifer Caron Hall, also setting up
a tradition where Nico would always be voiced by a different person — each
trying their best to imitate a cute, but stern French accent, which at least
helped them all sound more or less similar to each other. All the other voiced parts
are even less distinctive than in the first game, relatively competently
portraying the stereotypical characters and their French, Mexican, or
Caribbean accents, but hardly memorable — not that they are given many
opportunities to be memorable, since the dialog is consistently mediocre and
the length of their appearances is usually short. General Graciento, acting
as the most frequently appearing of the game’s villains (and also the only
one with some character development along the way), could have potential if
they’d found somebody like Tim Curry to voice him; unfortunately, his voice
actor is so bland and one-dimensional that he cannot even give his character
a properly intimidating aura for any duration of time. Overall, you know your
voice acting ain’t no great shakes when the single most memorable thing about
it turns out to be the creepy giggling of a couple of Japanese tourist girls
which George and Nico run into in European museums. |
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Interface Since the game runs on the
exact same engine as Shadow
(Revolution Software’s «Virtual Theatre»), there is little to add about its
interface structure and game mechanics that was not already mentioned in the
previous review. The point-and-click algorithm remains the same (left click
on an object / person to operate / talk, right click to get a verbal
description); the inventory window merges with various dialog options when
you strike up conversations, eliminating the need for blindly testing all
your possessions on people you interact with; and the game is once again
structured in a way that prevents dead ends or large numbers of pointless
deaths (though you can die in a few
critical situations). The Remastered version introduces more or less the same changes as The Director’s Cut of Shadow, including a redesigned
inventory window, condensed text bubbles for dialog, a diary to keep track of
what’s happened, and an integrated hint system (which I never used, so I
can’t really tell you how helpful it is). As with the first game, veteran
players tend to grumble about most of these changes, but I think it is mostly
a matter of being accustomed to one style or another — or, at the very least,
of very minor nit-picking. It is true that both games were made just a tad
easier in the newer versions, with a few of the puzzles being simplified and
the hint system put in place, but both games still remain challenging, and
the world-building aspect, which is the reason number one why I am playing
them and writing about them, is not impaired by the changes in any way, so
why should I give a damn? |
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Some sequels are lucky enough to have their own place on best-of lists
along with their predecessors, even if they do not exactly take the franchise
into a different direction. The Smoking
Mirror is not a lucky winner of this lottery: although it feebly tries to
expand the universe of Broken Sword
by taking us to a different corner of the globe and tapping into a completely
different mythological tradition, it fails to make any truly substantial
contributions to the basic rules of this universe, expand or vary its
character roster, or even fully maintain its witty humor. «More of the same,
but a little weaker» describes the game in a nutshell, and saddest of all is
the fact that it pretty much killed off Charles Cecil’s own evolution — from
a visionary artist who could put his own stamp on several genres, from
fantasy to sci-fi to detective mystery, he pretty much turned into a lifelong
biographer of George Stobbart... which, arguably, is far from the worst
imaginable career, but, also arguably, far from the best imaginable career
for such an inventive and original designer as Cecil. That
said, the only good result that came out of the game’s rushed production and
release was that, having been designed in the exact same style and manner as
its predecessor, it managed to retain all of its «vintage», Tintin-esque 2D
charm, meaning that it is really
«more of the same» in the good sense of the word. Obviously, going in the
direction of full motion video (which was already on its way out by 1997) was
a no-go for this kind of wild adventure tale, but trying out the newly
nascent 3D style already was an
option, and it is at least good enough that Revolution managed to hold off on
that until 2003, by which time 3D renders were beginning to look a little less
awful than they were in the pre-Half
Life era. And by the time Cecil came to his senses and returned the
franchise back to glorious 2D with the fifth game, the old art team was gone,
along with its unique drawing style — meaning that in some small way, The Smoking Mirror closed an era after
all. Ultimately, its charms are too many to brusquely proclaim it a bad game
— disappointing, yes, but still good to have as a clumsier, but earnest young
companion to its superior predecessor. |
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