Point and click games have been a great love of mine ever since the days when they came on multiple flopp😼y disks and were housed in giant A4-sized boxes, with more paperwork than you’d ever fit in a modern game case. Back in the ‘90s, we saw the launch of many of the best point and clicks ever made, from the Monkey Island games to Grim Fandango, Discworld, Day of the Tentacle, and let’s not forget, the start of the Broken Sword series.

Point and clicks are relatively rare these days, though every few years we get a new gem to enjoy. Broken Sword released its fifth title in 2013 after a successful Kickstarter launch, Ron Gilbert introduced us to Thimbleweed Park in 2017, the Monkey Island series made a comeback in 2022 w🍬ith Return to Monkey Island. There have also been other ꧟smaller titles, such as Lucy Dreaming and The Case of the Golden Idol, to keep point-and-click fans appeased.

Now, the Broken Sword series is making a new comeback, not only offering a remaster of the first game in the series with 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Broken Sword - Shadow of the Templa🍷rs: Reforged, but also inviting players on an all-new adventure with George and Nico in the upcoming Broken Sword: Parzival's Stone. Point and click games feel like they’re making a comeback, and that’s great for veteran fans of the genre who are well acquainted with how they work, but for newcomers, the gameplay can be a lot to get to grips with.

Appealing To Both Longtime Fans And Newbies

To help bring the genre to a new audience, Reforged will offer two modes, a traditional mode that’s f🧸aithful to the original where players have to do all the sleuthing themselves, and a story mode that will give players a helping hand. One of the biggest selling points of story mode is that it helps you without removing the sense of accomplishment you get by figuring it out yourself.

Things have changed since I first played Broken Sword. That was back before my family had the internet, and you would just suffer for days being stuck on puzzles or hope you knew someone who was not only also playing, but further ahead than you were. There were premium numbers you could call, but my parents would never let me call those as they’d cost you a small fortune. Now, walkthroughs are very commonplace and so having a hint system in the game doesn’t seem like much of a leap, but having the solution so 🐽easily at your fingertips in the game is just a bit too tempting.

Broken Sword creator Charles Cecil explains that the problem with typical hint systems that give the answer is that once a player uses them, the magic of solving💦 puzzles for themselves is broken, a꧙nd they are more likely to just keep using the hint system over and over.

“What we don’t want to do is patronise them by giving them the solution,” Cecil says. “The biggest compliment that I hear about our games is when people say they don’t feel like puzzles, they feel like interesting narrative challenges that need to be overcome. In designing puzzles, that’s what we want. There needs to be 🍬a challenge, but that challenge mustn’t frustrate, and it’s an incredibly fine balance to get right.”

Reforged’s story mode will instead start to remove options you have exhausted. If you click on an item a couple of times and glean all the information you can, it eventually becomes something you can no longer click as it’s no longer neces𒊎sary. The more you play and explore, the more the game will narrow down your options, eventually leading you to the right conclusion while still giving you the sense of satisfaction of solving it for yourself. It’s a clever evolution of the genre that could see it truly thrive with a new generation of players.

“What I’d like to convey and try to co♉nvince people is that the point and click interface is actually a really good, simple interface from which ෴complexity emerges,” Cecil tells us. “We’re clearly keeping that, but just trying to bring a user experience that feels appropriate for 2024 rather than 1996.”

Cecil is also considering whether interactable hotspots should be re-enabled if you haven’t played for a while to help you gather your bearings once more, and remind you of any important context you may have forgotten. In addition to this, the team plans to implement a way to wind back the dialogue so players can go back to an extent to see what had happened beforehand. It’s qualit⭕y of life improvements like 𒆙this that will make the game accessible for not only new players of the series, but players new to the genre.

Though players unfamiliar with point and clicks may utilise the benefits of story mode and how it hones down the options a lot at first, as they get more used to the genre and its usual tropes, they’ll gain more of an intuition for what is happening and won’t find themselves🥃 relying on the system as much. It al🦄most feels like point and click training wheels to ease players into a genre they might not otherwise have tried.

Additionally, the original version would sometimes be unclear that you could both interact and examine elements when placing a cursor above them, so Reforged will mak🌠e it much clearer so that you don’t miss any vital clues.

The Infamous Goat Puzzle

If you ever played the original Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars, you’ll have encountered a foul beast who bested you over and over until you 𒅌wanted to tear your hair out. You have to perform one action, then while lying on the ground, quickly click another hotspot to succeed. The goat in Ireland is arguably the hardest puzzle in the game, and as a result, Cecil considered simplifying it for the Story Mode for Reforged (something the team also did for the Director’s Cut).

“I would argue with the goat the problem is that we are introducing a new mechanic that you click on things while you’re in a particular state for the first time a third of the way throug♋h the game, which I’m not sure is all that fair.”

While I want everyone to have to suffer through the goat like I did when I first played, misery loves company and all that, I ౠcan see why Story Mode might need an easier way to handle him.

𝐆Despite my faded memory telling me what to do, I still failed🥃 multiple times to get the timing right while playing Reforged, to the point where I questioned if I had remembered the solution correctly.

The huge success of the Reforged Collector’s Edition 💎on Kickstarter has reaffirmed to the team that long term Broken Sword fans are still passionate about the series and that there is the volume to justify a brand new adventure game. Though Cecil wouldn’t promise a🦩nything, he says the team would “be pretty stupid not to” revisit Broken Sword 2 as a remaster also, and also expressed that he’d love to revisit the rest of the series, too.

Traditionally, Revolution Software publishes games as soon as they’re finished, resulting in the PC version coming out months before the console version. “This time, thanks to the Kickstarter, what we’re in a position to be able to do is pretty much finish the PC [versiﷺon], then write the console versions, while we hone the PC [version],” Cecil says, explaining this extra time gives them the opportunity to finetune g𒁏raphics, bugs, and final polish, that will then also apply to the console version.

Revolution Software is taking Reforged very seriously as it could potentially mark the start of a revival of the whole series if it does well. For it to be a true success📖, it needs to not only resound with the existing fanbase, but also find its feet with a new generation and get modern players to appreciate and fall in love with point and clicks. I know I’m already sold on Reforged, but my next challenge is to convince my 11-year-old to play it.