Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars

Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars opens with one of the best-remembered introductory scenes in adventure game history: American tourist George Stobbart is sitting outside a Paris café when a clown with an accordion walks in and leaves behind a briefcase ticking with a bomb. From an accidental witness he becomes an investigator who, together with journalist Nicole Collard, unravels a trail leading through medieval history, lost manuscripts, and a secret society tied to the Knights Templar. The story takes the player from Paris to Ireland, Spain, Syria, and Scotland, and play alternates between the two heroes, so the same plot gets uncovered from two sides.

Control is classic point-and-click with a simple interface where the cursor itself hints at what can be interacted with. The puzzles are mostly logical and grounded in the situation, so the player advances more through conversation and observation than by blindly trying every item in the inventory; the game does contain a few traps that can kill you, though, so it's worth saving regularly. Technically it was a two-dimensional game with hand-drawn backgrounds and fully animated characters, released in both DOS and Windows versions, and on the Pentiums of the day it ran smoothly straight off the CD, complete with full voice acting and animated cutscenes.

The artwork is the main reason the game has aged so well: the backgrounds have a watercolor palette, the character animation draws on traditional cartoon filmmaking, and the orchestral score with a hint of ethnic instruments keeps the tone of an adventure film rather than a detective story. The humor is dry and British, the dialogue is well written, and violence stays in the background. Critics of the time ranked the game among the best the genre produced in the mid-nineties, and the series carried on thanks to it with further installments continuing to this day. Today Broken Sword is often recommended as an entry point into classic adventure games, because it's accessible, well told, and doesn't demand patience with nonsensical puzzles.