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'.

Also known as Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars, this is quite a gorgeous point and click adventure, with superlative graphics and animation, brilliant voice acting, and an engaging plot with some fiendish puzzles. Safe to say that this game was the pinnacle of the genre, a notable pedigree stretching from the Golden-Age of Sierra and Lucasarts right up to the end of DOS gaming and the birth of Windows. Charles Cecil took what was by then a by-the-numbers style of game and added a sense of style and polish that truly raised the bar.

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.

Now this is an absolute classic. If you asked someone to name you a graphic adventure that isn't developed by LucasArts or Sierra, chances are pretty high that they're going to name Broken Sword. For many, this is one of the pinnacles of the genre.

I think one of the best things about this game is that it really captures the feeling of an adventure in the sense of, for example, the Tin Tin comics: The sense of mistery, the exotic, the traveling, all those elements are there. And just like happened in the first Gabriel Knight game, the historiographical theme works great for the story.

Another great thing of this game is that, since the puzzles are pretty logical most of the times, there aren't many chances of getting stuck, so the game flows amazingly and it never gets dull or tiring. I might have probably got stuck twice, but not more than that.

I think the game still has it's problems. I think the characters are pretty uninspiring: The main characters are pretty bland, and the more stereotypical ones doesn't even work for the sake of comedy. I guess it's all related to certain writing issues. Dialog, for example, is really childish for the most part, and the voice-acting is far from helping it. These problems are somewhat of a shame considering how good the base for the story is.

Nevertheless, you should definitely play this, even if you're not a hardcore fan of the genre.