I played the PS1 version of this game. The music, the atmosphere, the lore, the dialogs...This game is so memorable it has become part of my life experience as a human.
From their 3rd installment they went with the 3d craze but the result was not as captivating. They returned back to 2d in 5th version but I still prefer their old style.
Nowadays, games with a story-line as rich as this is very rare. Please recommend if you know any.
LucasArts games series is too old for me (and I don't fancy their complicated interaction mechanics).
I very much adore 18, 19 and 20th century European adventures with colorful styles. You know? Like Blake and Mortimer series, or The Adventures of Tintin.
Closest to Broken Sword I can think of would be Runaway series by Pendulo Studios, All three episodes are awesome.
Anything published by Wadjet Eye is amazing - Blackwell series, Gemini Rue, Shardlight, Primordia, Technobabylon, Strangeland.
The Book of Unwritten Tales 1, 2 and prequel are my absolute favorites.
Harvey and Edna 1 and 2 are close behind. Deponia is supposed to be good, but I couldnt stand the protagonist :(. The Whispered World and A New Beginning were ok, but very German.
Captain Morgane and the Golden Turtle is great. Its a prequel to So Blonde, havent played, made by lead designer of Broken Sword.
A Vampyre Story is hilarious.
The Longest Journey 1 and 2.
Secret Files series.
Syberia, altho it was too French/weird for me.
>Like Blake and Mortimer series, or The Adventures of Tintin.
you can try Jack Orlando: A Cinematic Adventure, except its located in US, but similar art style?
Backbone, good adventure game if you dont mind the furries :). Published by Raw Fury who also does Clifftop Games. Clifftop made two solid games in Adventure Game Studio:
Kathy Rain
Whispers of a Machine
Didnt play but are supposedly good:
Darkestville Castle
Dead Synchronicity
The Dark Eye series
Titles like Grim Fandango or Thimbleweed Park were too obvious to list. Adventure games seem to be doing better than ever despite everyone claiming early nineties as the golden age.
played it on the gameboy advance, same experience. i can still remember a few of the hand-drawn scenes and (for a child) inscrutable puzzles. something about a runaway floor buffer.
I need to play this game again... I really miss the good old times of adventure point-n-click games. Too bad we kind of lost the genre. My favourites were Monkey Island and the Indiana Jones series. There was always a good dose of humour in these games
I recommend games from Wadjet Eye Games studio, they're really well made, with great story, voice acting, balanced difficulty and overall they feel like created in the 90s.
The Blackwell series from Wadjet is absolutely spectacular and 100% brought me back to that 90s adventure games feeling! Super recommend them too! (I also cried like a baby at the series conclusion)
Day of the Tentacle. Perfectly captures the height of the genre, or at least its first peak: Mature graphics given the technical constraints, 4th-wall-breaking self-deprecating humor (the game is a joke and it knows). Nothing is serious and you should be able to try anything and everything without any repercussions other than not progressing (if you don't, you might miss out on a joke).
Broken Sword was the second peak, when stories became more serious and played more like an interactive novel. There are still jokes, but the game itself isn't one anymore.
I would argue that 3D games and consoles happened. People started demanding more from games: They had to be bigger, more immersive, visually more advanced. The niche gamers still existed, but the publishers didn't want to cater to them, for the most part.
The Broken Sword series is actually notable for surviving this trend, by transitioning to 3D and being console-friendly.
Fortunately, "the long tail" also happened, and the market has expanded in scale and improved ease of distribution (Steam, Itch, etc.) to the point that it's no longer true that every game has to be a big-budget "AAA" game; there's plenty of room for tons of niche stuff like adventure games, and it can be profitable.
My guess is that point and click adventures are not very profitable. There are no in game trinkets to sell, they don't fit a subscription model. I guess you can slowly release "chapters" and sell them independently and some developers do it these days but the user churn should be high as there is almost no desire to replay once you complete a chapter.
Much like other "dead" genres like the text adventure before it or the RTS after, the thrust of the idea that point-and-clicks are "dead" is that they were once firmly in the mainstream and are now niche.
A fantastic game, engrossing story, handpainted graphics and real world locations.
The non English editions have fantastic voice acting too.
Heck I even travelled across Ireland motivated by what I experienced in the game. The game story was very on point with regards to Ireland :).
Paris is factual too.
10/10 would recommend.
I for one am replaying it for the third time in a third language, challenging but not a waste of time for learning, as it is so well done.
The characters in Ireland all have Irish accents. Check.
In Syria, the characters all sound Arabic. Check.
Most of the Parisians have a French accent. Check. But the thugs outside the Ubu have New York accents (OK, clearly an intended joke), the receptionist at the hospital has an American accent (iirc). Come to think of it, no-one in the hospital has a French accent, do they?
And the de Vasconcellos lady (in Spain) has a British accent for some reason.
Distinct memory of having a painful conversation with my angry mum as a bairn, after I had racked up a hefty phone bill on one of those Game Walkthrough Help Lines while playing this game.
When I was a kid and Super Nintendo was the new hotness, a friend and I loved 'Shadowrun'.
A group of us had played various TT games over the years and loved video game adaptations but that one in particular was fantastic for an ARPG.
We had for years wondered where a spell was that was listed in the manual.
We tried everything, asked everyone we could think of, when finally we decided to call the Nintendo Power hotline, whatever it was called.
The charges started immediately and as you listened to a recorded spiel.
I think was several selections later we spoke with an agent who looked it up and informed us he could tell us for an additional fee. We agreed and he informed us the spell had been removed either prior to release or in the localization.
We were devasated.
Weeks later my Dad gets a call from my friend's parents. We go over and they explain they had a huge phone bill because apparently my friend had called them back asking all kinds of stuff for games, then it progressed to phone sex lines.
Of course this was all my fault. So not only did I have to do yard work all summer to pay it down, but he got to enjoy his summer scott free.
My question was how did they not know either time it was squeaky-voiced kids.
I guess they didn't have to since all the commercials said something like 'kids must have parents permission to call'.
"Indeed, I’ve probably already spent more time on the historical backstory of Broken Sword here than it deserves..."
Not at all. What a great review of a beloved sub-genre. Sometimes I think about re-reading Foucault's Pendulum out of sheer joy at the memory. But then I usually get by with just recommending it to someone else who foolishly brings up anything in the Dan Brown/Indiana Jones space.
Ah good memories, this is type of gaming i enjoyed a lot.
I recall some article that some small French town where part of the game happened had massive bump in tourism after the game came out. In times where computer gaming was mostly looked on as weird geek hobby for few.
That takes me back. Loved this game so much. Even the 2nd one was great. The 3rd one was average at best, and the 4th one very enjoyable. I haven't played the fifth installment yet.
Comments are already full of great recommendations if you like these games, I would just add Runaway which, to me, was such a breath of fresh air at a time where point n clicks were kind of gone.
I've just installed scummvm on my tablet and put beneath a still sky on it. That and broken sword are two games that I never got to play with the dedication is deserves. I'm trying to play a little bit before bed to see if I can finish them.
I installed ScummVM on my old tablet Turing it into a wonderful adventure game console. For me also perfect to play in bed to calm down a bit from a busy day. The games play wonderful in this form factor. Also I was pleasantly surprised that not only the old scumm games work on it but also some brilliant calssics like the Longest Journey and Blade Runner.
Thanks for the find! This was one of the first adventure games I laid my hands on as a young boy. Lent it from a neighbour and it immediately captured me. One of the aspects that were most intrigueing to me, was, that compared to other PaC-adventures that I had played, there were several situations, in which George could actually die. This gave the game a dynamic and immersion, that I hadn't experienced before. Which was, of course, partly due to the game selection I had played before.
Nevertheless, I am glad to be reminded of this gem!
Too bad that the adventure game genre faded after that period. Those that survived went for 3D rendering, which for adventure games just doesn't feel right. I'll always take an old 2D hand painted adventure game over a 3D one.
This is definitely part of their fall. Everyone -- from producers to players -- _thought_ they needed 3D. But it's poorly suited to adventure games. Shadow of the Templars is an excellent example of this: new enough not to be pixel art; old enough not to be 3D. Perfect.
Even the Monkey Island games turned 3D with the fourth installment. Having played through them all (again!) over lockdown, it's that game, Escape from Monkey Island, which now looks and plays the worst.
Don't forget AdvJam 2018 (or other years) which have dozens of small games that actually are excellent. Favourite game is Spy Quest which emulates Sierra games of old. You can get AdvJam walkthrough videos on YouTube.
I completely had forgotten this title even existed. In fact, I don't seem to remember any of these titles except for Beneath a Steel Sky. And I played them all.
Went down a rabbit hole exploring the links on this blog. Engrossing stories, and I will never tire of story trope of the small company with a chip making an impact by following their own beliefs
From their 3rd installment they went with the 3d craze but the result was not as captivating. They returned back to 2d in 5th version but I still prefer their old style.
Nowadays, games with a story-line as rich as this is very rare. Please recommend if you know any.
LucasArts games series is too old for me (and I don't fancy their complicated interaction mechanics).
I very much adore 18, 19 and 20th century European adventures with colorful styles. You know? Like Blake and Mortimer series, or The Adventures of Tintin.