Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars Reforged (Nintendo Switch) Review

Fans of Broken Sword will know what to expect from Broken Sword - Shadow of the Templars: Reforged. George Stobbart, an American tourist visiting Paris gets entangled in a conspiracy after a clown bombs a cafe. In the aftermath of the attack, George meets Nico, an attractive French photojournalist, which leads to George diving deeper into a conspiracy of assassinations and establishes the series norm of them both working together to unravel mysteries and conspiracies involving historical artefacts and secret societies.

This leads him on a globe-trotting quest across Europe and the Middle East, where he encounters a variety of colourful characters and solving puzzles. The duo goes on an adventure that spans the globe, finding hidden passages, exploring mausoleums, and prevent devil worshipping cultists from taking over the world. It's a classic, pulpy story that takes cues from Indiana Jones and does the DaVinci Code before Dan Brown wrote it.

Broken Sword is a product of its time. Like many point-and-click adventure games like it from the 90s, George will have to investigate every pixel on screen and talk with every NPC he sees. Expect to find a thing and put it in the other thing. What elevated Broken Sword was its characters, sense of humour, and intrigue. There have been four sequels and as of 2023, a sixth game in development, yet the first entry still manages to captivate and suck gamers into its world. It's expertly paced, George and Nico are wonderfully written characters.

Broken Sword - Shadow of the Templars: Reforged is a remaster of the original 1996 iteration. Players can play with the original pixel art visuals or the newly redrawn and reanimated art. The original visuals still hold up and have a lot of charm. The new art is a bit of a mixed bag, but mostly good. Some background art looks sterile and lack the punch that the pixel art had. The new character sprites look great in motion but feel more lifeless than the old sprites when idling. They needed to have more animation when standing in place. The new sprites can come off a flat and disconnected to the backgrounds.

The new animation for the cutscenes is superb and justify the Reforged subtitle. The original animations were a little rough and wobbly. Characters came off as mushy and doughy. The new animation has characters stay on model as they move around and emote.

Regretfully, Broken Sword - Shadow of the Templars: Reforged is missing some things that would make it the definitive Broken Sword experience. None of the of the content from the Director's Cut made it in. In the Director's Cut, Nico was a playable character and there was added sequences that would further flesh out some of the events in the story. The scenario would alternate between Nico and George chapters, adding significant play time to the adventure, as well as adding new puzzles.

Broken Sword - Shadow of the Templars: Reforged has a classic mode that keeps hints to a minimum and the story mode which spells things out more clearly. What's amusing is that the Director's Cut removed all the death scenes and fail states which have been restored in Reforged, even in story mode. All blood has been restored which was ironically cut from the Director's Cut. While the vanilla version of the story has punchier pacing without the Nico chapters, but it feels wrong to not have the option to allow players to choose the Director's Cut experience.

Another issue is that the voice acting audio is heavily compressed and muffled. Unfortunately, this is the best fans can hope for since the original recordings are gone. It feels wrong to play Broken Sword with the HD visuals when paired with inconsistent audio that has sharp music but muffle voices. When playing with the original graphics, the disconnect isn't as bad and enhances the old school appeal.