Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars (PS1) Playthrough - NintendoComplete

A playthrough of THQ's 1998 graphic-adventure game for the Sony PlayStation, Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars.

Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars, released in 1996 on the PC as Circle of Blood ("Broken Sword" was added to the European version's title), was an extremely popular point-and-click graphic adventure when it was released. It featured a well-written story that often felt like a diet version of Dan Brown's The DaVinci Code (or more directly, Cecil's The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail) thanks to its obsession with the Crusades and the Knights Templar, it looked fantastic with it's high-resolution hand painted backgrounds and rotoscoped character animations, and it sounded just as good things to it's well-acted voice over and classy musical score. It was pretty easy compared to other graphic adventures, but it raised the bar in so many ways that it didn't really matter too much - it still had its moments. Who remembers that stupid damned goat puzzle?

The PlayStation game was originally released in Euope in 1996 and reached America finally in 1998, and it was a good, though certainly not flawless, facsimile of the original. It runs at an oddly reduced resolution: whereas the original version runs at 640x480, the PS1 halves the vertical resolution and scales the image to 4:3, presumable due to the Playstation's limited RAM. While this is preferable to reducing the whole thing to 320x224 since it maintains much more detail, it does introduce some blurriness to the razor-sharp PC display, and some items that were already difficult are nearly impossible to see with the reduction. And since this change also impacts the sensitivity of the cursor, it can be infuriating trying to activate a hotspot that's only a couple of pixels wide - the cursor will sometimes sweep right over spots like these without any indication that there's something to interact with there. On a CRT screen the effects of the blurriness are minimized, but I wish there had been some sort of hotspot "jump" feature like the GBA port featured. It would've helped alleviate some of those frustrations.

The other unfortunate side-effect of the porting process has to do with the speed of the game. Loading screens are a frequent imposition, as are small pauses when clicking on something/someone - since all of the descriptions and dialogues are voiced, the system has to stop to load just about every interaction. It's not too bad, but it does slow the game a touch. Far more egregious, however, is the variable speed of the overall game - though it's mostly limited to the Syrian marketplace. When there are too many animated characters on-screen at once, the entire thing bogs down: the screen scrolling lags, the cursor starts to jump, and you have to hit the command button several times for it to register the input - it's damn near unplayable. Thankfully this limits itself (mostly) to that one section, but it was bad enough to nearly make me stop playing.

Overall, though, Broken Sword is a quality conversion. It (usually) runs better than similar PC-to-PS1 adventure game ports like Discworld, and if you didn't have a good PC in the mid/late 90s, this was a respectable way to play it.

Porting problems aside, and though I tend to find the game a bit overrated, Broken Sword is a quality adventure title that ought to be played by anyone who is a fan of the genre. The big production values, engaging story, well-crafted characters and brisk pacing all make for a good time.

If you want a good adventure circling around the Templars though, I'd recommend Gabriel Knight: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned. It tells a much better story.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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