A lukewarm recommendation to what feels more like a tribute, than an official entry of a beloved series. Is it a timid step towards its roots, after so many lows? Or a stagnation that’s here to stay?

Pros, Cons, Issues, Analysis and Verdict further down.

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🟩 Pros
🟥 Cons
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🟩 The gameplay works thanks to its simplicity and almost flawless execution. You have pointing and you have clicking, alright. You may want to play this when you want something cozy that doesn’t require a keyboard at all.

🟩 The orchestral music that evolves with your choices is a sweet callback to the original masterpiece, Shadow of the Templars (which you should definitely play, although not the Director’s Cut.

🟩 The chemistry between the characters, namely George and Nico, is a caricature of its former self due to the writing, yet you can feel something good in there, if only thanks to the voice actors. More on that later.

🟩 The graphics, albeit not as nice-looking as the cartoon style we can appreciate on 1 & 2, is a breath of fresh air. It looks well curated, sober and gentle to the eyes.

🟥 The puzzles, the cornerstone of this kind of games, are unfortunately a mixed bag. Some of them are so obtuse that even a toddler can grasp them (aided by the fact that, more often than not, they take place in enclosed areas and not whole maps). Some can be perceived as pretty difficult for the wrong reasons, instead.

🟥 The writing is mind-bogglingly uninspired and corny. I always wondered why that was the case since BS3, and I think I’ve finally unveiled the mystery. Bear with me: we’ll find out together.

🟥 The dev team likes to recycle so many elements, it’s honestly absurd. The song Jasmine, as an example, overstays its welcome, popping out at least two times while the credits roll, and four times during gameplay (mind you, it has vocals, so especially during dialogues it becomes exhausting). Then we have jokes that get repeated ad nauseam: not only verbal ones, even those of circumstance. Remember the infamous goat puzzle in BS1? Guess what: the goat makes an appearance here too. Three times.

🟥 The entire plot arc is diametrically opposed to that of the first game, in the sense that it is crippled by bad pacing and a highly forgettable story, the latter of which, is also fully imbued with cheap philosophical speeches and paper-thin characters.

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🟨 Bugs & Issues
🔧 Mods & Patches
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🟨 The bugs, although rare, are present. By clicking a bit too much during a dialogue later on in the game, I managed to freeze the characters in place, and I spawned two George Stobbarts holding pistols. No joke. However, we’re talking about amusing glitches here that do not translate into soft-locks or anything like it.

🔧 Currently there’s neither. I don’t think you would need those anyway.

🍃 Paris in the fall. No, wait…

We’re back in France, yet this time it is a much more colorful spring, during present times. Here we witness our main character and deuteragonist, respectively George Stobbart the witty American, and Nicole Collard the equally sagacious French, enjoying an art exhibit somewhere in Paris. The former became an insurance agent who manages the exhibition, while the latter came into the gallery for one of her journalist gigs. Things go awry pretty quick, and not only we’re made spectators of a theft, but a murder as well. The cheapest painting gets stolen by a gun-toting lunatic with a helmet on his head, and the handler, while trying to avoid this fate, got shot. From here, we attempt to uncover who the man is, why he went to such lengths just to obtain the art piece of lesser value, and before we know it, we find ourselves entangled in yet another global conspiracy…

At the very beginning we’re already met with your typical nostalgic charade, comprised of a few recurring characters from older titles. This will be the case even as time moves on, and although that is perfectly fine, it is a bit of a shame how [u]some[/u] new VAs completely butchered their appeal. Coupled with the bland and stereotyped writing, we have some very distorted personalities from start to finish. I then asked myself why the lightning in a bottle that was “Shadow of the Templars” couldn’t be repeated (and arguably, its sequel “The Smoking Mirror”). What I soon found out, is that a huge part of the fine writing we appreciated back in the day, was tightly knitted by Dave Cummins, who left Revolution after the 2nd game. That explained a lot, and I suspect something similar happened to the animators, their Don Bluth-style art, which greatly influenced the downfall of BS games, again, after the second installation.

For better or for worse, new blood has come to RevSoft, and from this point onwards we’ll try to judge their work for this game, without too many comparisons. Let’s begin.

📝 Writing isn’t good, but what about gameplay?

As you may have guessed by this point, it’s the amalgamation of top notch art-style, suggestive music scores, provocative lines and intelligent game design that make a Broken Sword game, good. The problem with The Serpent’s Curse is unfortunately the fact that it doesn’t excel in any of those (at least if we judge them as a whole and “ex post”, as in, compared to how high the bar of expectations is currently set). What I really mean by this, is that this is a nice Broken Sword [i]and[/i] graphic adventure, that nonetheless does not live up to its name.

We see a glimmer of redemption in the puzzles, which are all pretty logical in nature, if a bit too monotonous. Still, nothing to write home about, and nothing that gets really stuck in your mind and makes you scream: “Wow, that was a good one! I’m really proud I solved it myself.” The reasoning behind this, first and foremost, is due to the fact that in every situation the characters – be the protagonists themselves or other people around us – will telegraph the solution someway or another. At times they can be pretty subtle about it, but they will still point you to the right direction, and so the sandbox feel of it all, vanishes instantly. We, like puppets, are moved by strings, then handholded towards the solution… It’s not as tragic at it sounds, but it’s still annoying at best. Then, we have solutions to puzzles that make perfect sense in our head, but aren’t the real ones. There’s a scene, for example, where we have to attach an object on top of a creature. We have a ball of string in our inventory, so it should be easy, right? No. We actually have to smear marmelade on said item, then glue it to the animal. Why the string doesn’t work? Who knows!

Then there’s the odd conundrum which resembles good ol’ moon logic, the same convoluted stuff we had in old point ‘n’ click adventures and are apparently inescapable. Luckily, I only found a single case of that, and it may not even apply to you. What probably will however, is the feeling that most of the riddles are suspiciously easy and not just because of what was stated earlier. It sort of feels like modern gamers are treated as potentially dumb, which, don’t get me wrong, may have a kernel of truth to it, but it’s infuriating nonetheless. And it’s a roller coaster also: you may have a time-sinker like anything else before, and soon after there’s a ridiculously simple puzzle that is solved just by using an item! It’s inconsistent.

💭 Verdict

Only for die hard fans.

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