Circle of Blood

released on Oct 14, 1996

Circle of Blood is a 2D adventure game played from a third-person perspective. The player uses a point-and-click interface to interact with the environment and to guide protagonist George Stobbart through the game's world. To solve puzzles and progress in the game, the player collects items that may be combined with one another, used on the environment, or given to non-player characters. The protagonist converses with NPCs via dialogue trees presented through "conversation icons" to learn about the game's puzzles and plot. Clues and other information are obtained by clicking on items in the inventory and on objects in the environment. The player navigates with a map, to which new locations are added as the story unfolds. Unlike in most adventure games at the time, the protagonist's death is possible, after which the player starts from the last save point.


Reviews View More

Do Americans even call this game Circle of Blood?

George Stobbart, the only likeable American tourist that has ever set foot in Europe.

If you do not love this game, you do not love life. I have nothing more to say. Truly the bedrock of why I still to this day adore adventure games.

Note* It is an abomination that the 1996 release is not available under its title in most countries 'Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars'.

look, i like this game quite a bit, the writing and humor is legitimately top notch, and even the puzzles (up until a point) use some good common sense logic that makes figuring them out satisfying, but the game does have a few problems that did hurt its overall quality. as mentioned before, most of the puzzles are pretty straight forward and feel natural, but many of the later puzzles will feel counterintuitive or even obtuse. like it hints you towards doing one thing, but that will sometimes get you killed (death isnt very frequent in this game and it autosaves often so dont worry too much about dying) and what you're actually supposed to do is something that SHOULD have killed you. also some pixel hunting, and a couple nonsensical puzzles. i got through most the game without a guide, but once it started pulling that, i was nearly dependent on it.
but the big thing that REALLY hurts this game is just how slowly george walks. if you need to check multiple areas trying to figure out exactly how you're supposed to do what you need to do, you'll spend several minutes just slowly walking around very very slooooowly, and it only gets more annoying as you get new areas that george just leisurely strolls through, and i couldnt help but remember those old point n clicks that literally came with a speed up function and wonder just why the hell this one didnt. i know curse of monkey island was a year later, but that game at least let you double click to immediately enter the next area. really hoping that's improved in the sequel.

One of the best point & click games ever made and superior to the Director's Cut that added Wii-era sliding puzzles and unnecessary Nico sections.

i NEED to finish this one day

The best point & click adventure game ever made. This game has it all - laugh out loud comedy, romance, history lessons, suspense, danger, rampaging goats and drunken geordies. Anyone who has an interest in story-driven gaming owes it to themselves to play this.