My Nerdy Commute: Broken Sword
I despise Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code series and everything it stands for. Those books are like Indiana Jones-themed Harlequin romances. Copies of The Lost Symbol belong on desks that sport hunky firefighter calendars, or in homes that have burned down.
Unfortunately, the new iPhone game Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars [iTunes link] has an awful name and draws large amounts of inspiration from The Da Vinci Code. Fortunately, it isn’t a blight on society and make me judge and hate you for owning it.
The art in the game is pretty amazing, even though these two look like they're straight off of a hair salon poster. I know, I know, that guy looks like me.
Yes, the main character is an American guy in Paris. Yes, he teams up with an attractive French woman. And yes, together they uncover a global secret society connected to the Christian Templar legend that uses a mysterious assassin to carry out their bidding. But it doesn’t matter. They take a hackneyed plot framework and craft the hell out of it. Every characters in the game is carefully beautifully animated, in a traditional frame-by-frame, Disney-esque style. And the panoramic environments are just amazing, like this scene from the Seine:
In Paris, even the sewers are beautiful.
The game has one of the best touchscreen interfaces I’ve seen in an iPhone title. It’s simple and super-intuitive, thanks no doubt to earlier releases on the Nintendo DS and Wii platforms, where they worked out the kinks. Tapping the screen walks your character around. More taps reveal nearby hotspots, which light up as blue circles. Further taps on the hotspots give you different ways to interact with them: talking, examining, and so on. In some puzzles you need to drag objects out of your bag (shown bottom left in these images) onto hotspots, as in one case where you need to drag a key out to unlock a door.
In this scene below, the finger prods get a little invasive; you’re examining a body. Touching his jacket has opened it up to reveal the cause of death. Further investigation reveals more clues, which I’ll let you find for yourself.
Just keep the poking above the waist, OK?
They throw a wide range of puzzles at you, from Tetris-like block puzzles to deciphering coded messages, letter by letter. Some of them feel a little forced; what kind of secret cult uses a Rush Hour-style sliding block puzzle to lock a sewer grate? If you get stumped, you can click the “Hint” button on the menu screen, but be warned: it’s more of an “Answer” button than a “Hint” button.
Broken Sword also features a full-blown orchestral soundtrack (nerdily available as an LP [iTunes link]), sound effects, animated cutscenes, and voice acting for every character interaction. All in all, it’s a excellent story to plunge into for a while each day on the commuter rail. Just whisper the mantra “I am not Tom Hanks in the worst movie in his career since Turner and Hooch” three times before each gaming session.
Broken Sword was originally released in 1996 on the PC so it certainly takes no inspiration fron The Da Vinci Code.
The animation on the Ipod does look as good as i remember it on the PC and the graphics haven’t aged like the Monkey Islands. The new additions in the Directors Cut give me a reason to play this instead of dusting off the original (probably to find it won’t run on a modern OS)
Oh yah, definitely pre-Dan Brown, thanks for noting that. Since writing this post, I’ve gotten pretty much to the end, but haven’t finished yet. There’s one puzzle that they made really difficult to solve without pen and paper, and since I play on the train while juggling a muffin, coffee and iPhone, it’s been a bit of a roadblock.