Broken Sword 5

I originally played the first two Broken Sword games on the original Playstation back when games were nothing more to me than colourful interactive images on the TV screen. I’m not sure what happened between then and now in terms of the series, but I saw a few videos referencing the goat from Broken Sword 2 and then saw Broken Sword 5 advertised so I thought to myself, ‘why not?’

Broken Sword 5 follows the tale of George Stobbart, an American art insurance guy in Paris. A murder is committed in one of the galleries his company has insured and a painting stolen. His company wants him to solve the murder to avoid the insurance payout in typical American fashion. Meanwhile, George is accompanied by his sexy French friend, Nico as they try to do the right thing.

It’s another point and click adventure game (because I don’t play enough of them) with a lot less character interaction and more investigating scenes to solve bizarre situational puzzles. Some of the ways you have to solve things in this game are ridiculous. The most notable of these involves using a cockroach to replace a fuse by putting a paperclip on its back. How anyone would view that as a logical solution to the problem of an out of reach fuse, I have no idea.

The characterisation is quite good throughout. There seems to be a balance in that you end up liking the characters you are meant to and hating the French. With the exception of Nico and Sergeant Moue, all the other French characters are portrayed as total douche bags.

There’s not much else to mention about the game without devaluing it. The story is main driver and it is quite strong in this area. However, there is one issue. There is a song by a fictional group called the Hairy Lobsters and they have a song called Jasmine which is quite often played as background music wherever you go. However, this causes a problem in a game where is it possible to spend over 30 minutes in an area trying to figure out the next bizarre mechanism to progress through the game. The song grates. And I mean, really grates.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 33 Achievements

Firstly, as you can probably gather from a story-driven game, there are 26 achievements which you get for following it through to the end. The remaining seven are missable and on my playthrough, I did something which resulted in me having to replay 5 hours worth of the game. I didn’t find this very amusing.

Basically, what I didn’t realise is when you save the game, it saves at the start of the room you last entered so I lost all of the items i collected but didn’t realise this. This meant that I missed an item I needed about 2 hours later in the game to get one of the secret achievements. This was a real, ‘FOR FUCK’S SAKE!’ moments that was very verbally conveyed at the time.

Out of the seven missable achievements, there’s not really a lot else to mention, but there is a funny one relating to goats. Broken Sword 2 had a goat puzzle which caused outrage at the time because its solution was so much in contrast to the rest of the game’s puzzles. In Broken Sword 5, you can get a goat to talk and when you do, he reveals that his appearance is only down to the cult hype surrounding the goat puzzle from the 2^nd instalment. I thought this was a great piece of fourth wall breaking narrative that was worth the effort to get it.

Downloadable Content – N/A

It’s an easy completion with a guide and doesn’t offer replay value. That said it is an enjoyable story experience, annoying songs and goats aside. Some of the scenes can be a bit drawn out and you have to listen to everything that’s said if you want to do it properly so can be quite demanding on the brain, especially if you are playing late at night (which I did).