Circle of Blood

aka: BS1, Baphomets Fluch, Broken Sword: Il Segreto dei Templari, Broken Sword: La leyenda de los Templarios, Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars, Les Chevaliers de Baphomet, Slomannyj Mech: Ten' Tamplierov
Moby ID: 499
Buy on Game Boy Advance
$5.62 used on Amazon
Buy on PlayStation
$41.25 used on Amazon
$47.85 used on eBay
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Description official descriptions

George Stobbart is an American tourist spending his autumn vacation in Paris. He barely escapes a bombing of a café and decides to investigate the clues left behind by the killer. This eventually leads him to a mystery dating back to the legend of the Knights Templar.

Circle of Blood is the first part in the Broken Sword series. It is a third-person puzzle-solving point-and-click adventure game with 2D cartoon-like graphics. The player moves the character around using the mouse, examines the environment, talks to other people and collects items stored in an inventory. These items need to be used or combined with other items to solve puzzles. George gets help from Nicole Collard, a French journalist. The story is divided into eleven chapters and takes place in locations such as Paris, Ireland, Syria, and others.

Spellings

  • Сломанный Меч: Тень Тамплиеров - Russian spelling
  • 断剑:圣殿骑士的阴影 - Simplified Chinese spelling

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Credits (DOS version)

115 People (112 developers, 3 thanks) · View all

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Reviews

Critics

Average score: 83% (based on 71 ratings)

Players

Average score: 4.0 out of 5 (based on 335 ratings with 14 reviews)

Neither fish nor fowl

The Good
Broken Sword is an example of what I like to call the "post-classical" period of adventure games. It was made after Sierra and LucasArts did everything they could with comedy, and the former also produced quite a few convincing experiments in a more "serious" genre.

Revolution - not exactly a rookie in the business, having authored the (in my opinion) more interesting Lure of the Temptress and Beneath a Steel Sky - tries to recreate the transparent atmosphere of the classical style. It might sound strange, but the one positive thing to say about Broken Sword is that there is nothing overly negative to say about it.

The game is solid, quite solid indeed. There are some nicely flowing dialogues and humorous remarks representing the dry British wit. There is more exploration and experimentation involved than in the less interesting sequel. The Paris part of the game, where it most resembles a detective story, is more successful than the later episodes - I enjoyed interrogating suspects and gathering evidence instead of blindly advancing the plot via contrived adventure game devices. Some of the puzzles feel right, being logical, neither too hard nor too easy. The graphics are technically good. In short, there is nothing wrong with this game...

The Bad
...just as there isn't anything really great in it. Typically of the "post-classical" period, energy and creativity are running low in Broken Sword. It looks back nostalgically almost in a way a fan tribute would. The entire genre was already in a crisis, and this game feels like a rather desperate attempt to ignore that. It contains many traditional adventure elements, but they don't mesh well because the designers were too focused on making everything "right" instead of having their own vision of what an adventure game should be like.

Not many games could tell serious stories right while spicing them with a bit of humor. Gabriel Knight series was one of the few that succeeded in that. Those games told deep stories and had dark, even macabre atmosphere; whenever they injected them with humor, they did it at the right time and in the right doses, so that it never interfered with the sinister atmosphere or disrupted the dramatic pace of the story. Broken Sword could not do the same. It's a bit of everything - silly "Monkey Island-lite" puzzles interspersed by murders, cozy dialogues with goofy people in quiet Irish villages against the backdrop of pseudo-historical conspiracies. This discrepancy in style was already evident in Revolution's earlier work, but here it becomes unnerving.

One big problem with the game is its dryness. Whether in the puzzles, dialogues, visuals, humor, or story, the tone is consistently distant - there is hardly any warmth. Gabriel Knight games combined all their historical and occult material with personal involvement. Their heroes suffered, had inner conflicts; they fought, loved and hated. The main characters of Broken Sword, on the other side, are indifferent. You never learn much about their personalities. You don't really care for them. And they also don't care that much for what's happening in the game.

Lukewarm puzzles have to be solved in order to advance a trite plot based on fake "discoveries" by some authors during the last couple of decades of the century. Since that, people started fixating, among other things, on Knights Templar, as if their alleged conspiracies could help us solve the real problems we face in the world. Thus, Broken Sword is quite distant from its modern-day setting, being more of a big cliche peppered by stereotypical exotics. This nonchalance is perfectly illustrated by the visuals: they are too bright, too neat, too sterile to convey the much-needed atmosphere.

The Bottom Line
Broken Sword was made according to the right standards, but the input of its own personality is minimal. It resembles a hard-working, but not particularly inspired student who did his best to imitate a great master. The result is a rather tepid game, neither bad nor exciting - classical, but not a classic.

Windows · by Unicorn Lynx (181788) · 2014

A awsome game

The Good
The fact that is is one of the few adventure games that rivals the Lucasarts games, basically everything I said about in my review of the PC version, in short this game is great

The Bad
The Playstation version suffers from load times everytime you leave a scene, this can turn off some gamers, and because of the reduced resolution some objects can be hard to find.

The Bottom Line
One of the few brillaint graphic adventures on the Playstation

PlayStation · by Grant McLellan (584) · 2001

A cute little game

The Good
Playing this game is an "experience." There's something cozy about the setting and story and the pacing of it all.

The Bad
Zilch! There's nothing wrong with this one.

The Bottom Line
A classic adventure game that's worth your time.

Windows · by Lal Fam (27) · 2024

[ View all 14 player reviews ]

Trivia

1001 Video Games

Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.

Animation

The game's animations and artwork were done by former animators and artists from Bluth Studios, makers of The Secret of NIMH, An American Tale, The Land Before Time, and the Dragon's Lair and Space Ace interactive arcade laser games.

Engine

The Game Boy Advance version does not use the Virtual Theatre game engine.

Extras

Some versions of the game came with the Knights Templar book Savage Warrior written by Steve Jackson.

Installation

The DOS/Windows installation program instead of showing a progress bar during the copying phase runs a Breakout variant. The paddle is controlled with the mouse.

Music

The game contains over two hours of original music from Britain’s composer Barrington Pheloung, also known for his TV theme music on Central Independent Television’s renowned Inspector Morse detective series starring John Thaw and Kevin Whately.

Information also contributed by Garcia, Rola and Sciere

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Ummagumma.

Game Boy Advance added by Kartanym. Windows Mobile added by Sciere. Palm OS added by Kabushi. Macintosh added by Scaryfun. PlayStation added by Grant McLellan. DOS added by MAT.

Additional contributors: Trixter, robotriot, Shane k, Unicorn Lynx, Jeanne, Apogee IV, anneso, Sciere, Kohler 86, Ghost Pirate, CaesarZX, Patrick Bregger, FatherJack.

Game added November 30, 1999. Last modified January 29, 2024.