Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars

Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars brought one of the most acclaimed point-and-click adventures of the 1990s to PlayStation, and despite the console's technical limitations it managed to preserve the magic of the original without losing any of its atmosphere. The player steps into the role of American tourist George Stobbart, who in Paris accidentally becomes entangled in an investigation of a conspiracy reaching back to the medieval Knights Templar and their legacy hidden across modern Europe, from Parisian cafés to remote Irish monasteries. The story combines humor, tension, and solidly researched historical mythology into one cohesive adventure carried by lively written dialogue and distinctive, memorable characters.

The gameplay rests on the classic principles of exploring the environment, collecting and combining items, and conducting dialogue with richly written characters, with puzzles designed to match the story's logic rather than being arbitrarily difficult and detached from context. The hand-drawn 2D graphics and animation transferred to PlayStation with minimal compromises, and the game retained its distinctive comic-book visual style inspired by European comics, including carefully rendered European cities. Controls were adapted for the console from a mouse-driven interface to a gamepad, which suited some players less than the original PC version, but this didn't significantly diminish the game's functionality or clarity.

Broken Sword was very highly praised by critics on its original PC release, and the PlayStation version allowed this kind of thoughtful narrative adventure to reach console players who might otherwise never have touched the PC version. To this day, the game is considered one of the best-written adventures of its era, and its PlayStation port showed that the point-and-click genre can work on consoles even without a mouse and keyboard, provided the controls are well thought out.

Why play it: For a thoughtful narrative adventure that proves the point-and-click genre works on console even without a mouse and keyboard.