Charles Cecil on how a broken sword

Point and click games have been a great love of mine since the days when they came on multiple floppies and were housed in giant A4 sized boxes with more paper than you could ever fit in a modern game box. The 90s saw the launch of many of the best point and clicks ever made, from Monkey Island to Grim Fandango, Discworld, Day of the Tentacle and let's not forget, the start of the Broken Sword series.

Point and click are pretty rare these days, although every few years we get a new gem to enjoy. Broken Sword released its fifth title in 2013 after a successful Kickstarter launch, Ron Gilbert brought us Thimbleweed Park in 2017, the Monkey Island series returned in 2022 with Return to Monkey Island. Other smaller titles such as Lucy Dreaming and The Case of the Golden Idol have also appeared to appease the point-and-click fans.

Now the Broken Sword series is back again, offering not only a remaster of the first game in the series with Broken Sword – Shadow of the Templars: Reforged, but also invites players to a whole new adventure with George and Nico in the upcoming Broken Sword: Parzival's Stone. Point and click games feel like they're making a comeback, and that's great for seasoned fans of the genre who know how they work, but for newcomers, the gameplay can be a lot to deal with.

Appealing to long-time fans and newcomers alike

To help bring the genre to new audiences, Reforged will offer two modes, a traditional mode that stays true to the original where players have to do all the tracking themselves, and a story mode that gives players a helping hand. One of the biggest strengths of the story mode is that it helps you without taking away the sense of accomplishment you get from figuring it out on your own.

Things have changed since I first played Broken Sword. This was before my family had the internet and you would just suffer for days stuck on puzzles or hope you knew someone who not only played but was further along than you. You could call premium numbers, but my parents never let me call them because it would cost you a fortune. Now, tutorials are very much a given, so having a help system in a game doesn't seem like much of a leap, but having an in-game solution so easily at your fingertips is too tempting.

Broken Sword creator Charles Cecil explains that the problem with typical answer-giving hint systems is that once the player uses them, the magic of solving puzzles for themselves is broken, and they're more likely to use the hint system over and over again.

“We don't want to support them by giving them a solution,” says Cecil. “The biggest compliment I hear about our games is when people say they don't feel like puzzles, but feel like interesting narrative challenges to overcome. That's what we want when designing puzzles. There has to be a challenge, but that challenge can't frustrate, and it's an incredibly fine balance to get right.”

George in the cave with the body in Broken Sword Reforged.

Instead, the Reforged story mode will start removing the options you've exhausted. If you click on an item multiple times and gather all the available information, it will eventually become something that you can no longer click on because it is no longer necessary. The more you play and explore, the more the game will narrow down your options and eventually lead you to the right conclusion while giving you the satisfaction of figuring it out on your own. It's a smart evolution of the genre that could see it really do well with a new generation of gamers.

“What I'd like to convey and try to convince people is that point and click is actually a really good, simple interface where complexity comes from,” Cecil tells us. “We're definitely following that, but we're just trying to deliver a user experience that's more suitable for 2024 than 1996.”

Cecil also considers whether or not interactive hotspots should be re-enabled if you haven't played in a while to help reorient you and remind you of any important contexts you may have forgotten. In addition, the team plans to implement a way to end the dialogue so that players can go back to some extent to see what happened before. It's quality-of-life improvements like this that will make the game accessible not only to new players of the series, but also to players new to the genre.

George and Nico in front of the cafe in Broken Sword Reforged in the newer graphics.-1

Although players unfamiliar with point-and-click may initially benefit a lot from the story mode and how it refines the options, as they get more used to the genre and its usual tropes, they'll gain more intuition for what's going on and not rely on the system as much. It almost feels like point and click training wheels to ease players into a genre they might not have tried otherwise.

Also, in the original version it was sometimes unclear that you could both interact with and examine elements by hovering over them, so Reforged makes that much clearer so you don't miss any crucial clues.

Shameful Goat Riddle

If you ever played the original Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars, you encountered a hideous beast that beat you over and over again until you wanted to tear your hair out. You must perform one action, then quickly click the next hotspot while lying on the ground to succeed. The Goat in Ireland is probably the hardest puzzle in the game, which is why Cecil considered simplifying it for Story Mode for Reforged (which the team also did for the Director's Cut).

“I'd argue with the goat that the problem is that we're introducing a new mechanic that you click on things the first time you're in a certain state a third of the way through the game, which I'm not sure is that fair.”

As much as I want everyone to suffer through the goat like I did when I first played, misery loves company and all, I can see why Story Mode might need an easier way to handle it.

Despite my faded memory telling me what to do, I failed to get the timing right several times while playing Reforged, leaving me questioning if I had memorized the solution correctly.

Broken Sword physical collector's edition on all platforms.

The huge success of the Reforged Collector's Edition on Kickstarter reaffirmed to the team that long-time fans of Broken Sword are still passionate about the series and that there is enough to justify a brand new adventure game. While Cecil wouldn't make any promises, he says the team would be “pretty stupid not to” revisit Broken Sword 2 as a remaster, and also expressed that he'd like to revisit the rest of the series as well.

Revolution Software traditionally releases games as soon as they are finished, resulting in the PC version being released months before the console version. “This time, thanks to Kickstarter, we are able to complete the PC. [version]then write the console versions while we polish the PC [version]” says Cecil, explaining that this extra time gives them the opportunity to fine-tune the graphics, bugs and final polish, which will then apply to the console version.

Revolution Software is taking Reforged very seriously, as it could potentially mark the beginning of a revival for the entire series if it does well. To be a true success, it needs to not only resonate with the existing fan base, but also find its feet with a new generation and make modern gamers appreciate and love point and click. I know I'm already sold on Reforged, but my next task is convincing my 11 year old to play it.