I don’t know when the term "director's cut" stopped meaning "a work re-edited to fulfill the director's original intent before it was subverted by second-guessing or budgetary restraints" to "a work padded out with rejected ideas and outtakes to make it seem like something new," but I do know that Revolution Software’s adventure game Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars – The Director's Cut falls solidly into the latter category.
The Good Old Stuff: Fun Characters and Dialogue
For the most part, this Wii version of the game is simply a port of the 1996 original. Once again, American tourist George Stobbart witnesses a costumed clown blowing up a Parisian cafe and decides to play detective, assisted by local journalist Nico. He soon uncovers a plot involving the ancient order of the Knights Templar and finds he must travel to Spain and Syria to uncover all the clues.
Much of the appeal of the Broken Sword series is its humorous dialogue. George has a light, cheeky attitude; when he senses danger he notes he has "a nasty feeling in my gut I usually associate with light opera." When he asks a bartender, "have you served any clowns today?" the reply is, "no, you’re the first today."
The game's cast is full of fun characters, such as a randy aristocratic lady and a Syrian taxi driver with a penchant for flowery English.
The Mediocre New Stuff: Nico Becomes a Star
The main addition to this revised version is a subplot involving Nico. While the original game starts with an amusing cut scene of George's encounter with the clown, whose balloon he pops, the director's cut begins with the decidedly less enthralling scene of Nico receiving a phone call from her editor. Her assignment is to interview a famous Parisian, but before she can, he is murdered by a mime. This, she believes, is yet another act by the "costumed killer" she has been reporting on.
There is little to recommend Nico's scenes. While as a supporting character she seemed sharp, sexy and slightly enigmatic, as a protagonist she comes across as bland and humorless. When George’s first scene finally comes, it feels like a breath of fresh, funny air in a stolid, workmanlike game.
Besides dragging down the game’s beginning, Nico’s turn as a protagonist also ruins much of the game's mystery. You no longer wonder about Nico and what she knows, because you already know what she's about, and you no longer wonder at the clown’s sudden appearance because you have already been told there is a costumed killer on the loose. Rather than appearing to be the final culmination of a director's attempt to restore his original vision, the new sections feel tacked on, lazy and ill-advised.
George and Nico trade scenes for the first part of the game until Nico's desultory subplot reaches its humdrum conclusion. After this Nico goes back to her original role as George’s sounding board.
The Mediocre Old Stuff: Lackluster Gameplay
One thing that George and Nico’s sections share is rather annoying gameplay. The biggest flaw is the game’s fondness for pixel hunting, that bane of adventure games in which onscreen objects are so tiny and difficult to see that the only way to find them is to carefully move your cursor over every inch of the screen until the cursor changes to indicate there is something there. Almost every time I was stuck in the game, it turned out the reason was simply that there was some little object I had overlooked. Fortunately, the director's cut has added a hint system that makes things a bit easier.
For the most part, puzzles in the game are solved in one of two ways, either by finding a tiny object whose use is obvious once you’ve got it or through conversation. Broken Sword has a huge amount of dialogue, and while it's often amusing, it also means you are listening to people talk far more than you’re doing anything that requires deductive reasoning. Often a puzzle will be solved if you just talk to enough people enough times. I often craved a respite from talk, and when I entered a pub to see six people I was going to have to converse with, I sighed. The fact that one of them refused to speak to me helped only a little.
As in many adventure games, one goes through Broken Sword trying to solve puzzles with no clear idea why. I spent time trying to get into a club’s restroom not because I knew of any good reason I would need to be in there but simply because the door was locked, and locked doors must always be breached in adventure games.
The Final Verdict: A Lesser But Somewhat Enjoyable Reinvention of an Okay Game
The game also offers some Wii-centric gameplay, as when you must open a combination safe by turning it with the remote. Unfortunately, this isn’t implemented well. I generally had problems with the cursor, which would become jumpy at the edge of the screen.
Occasionally Broken Sword has an actual puzzle to solve, but rarely one that requires much ingenuity. Great adventure games like Day of the Tentacle and Zork Nemesis asked players to think outside the box, but Broken Sword simply requires that you ask questions, search carefully and put objects in the appropriate holes.
None of this makes Broken Sword a bad game, but it does make it an odd choice for a revival. It would have made more sense to port the excellent, most recent entry in the series, Broken Sword: The Angel of Death.
Still, Broken Sword is considered by many to be a classic game well deserving of the "director's cut" treatment. But if this is really the game director Charles Cecil intended to make in 1996 if not for interfering investors or a lack of funds, then he was very lucky to have had to compromise his vision, because this "director's cut" adds nothing but an extra layer of mediocrity.
