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
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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 334 ratings with 13 reviews)

One of the last true adventures of the 90s

The Good
When i played the Broken Sword demo (Circle of Blood in america) i felt that this game had something in special... Some time passed and i made of my own a copy of that game, joining George Stobbart in his adventures was a great pleasure, really great animations with an adult-cartoon feel, great atmospheric music and tons of ironic humor by our 'american hero' Stobbart. We will travel to a lot of locations (something i always liked in a game) and meet some charismatic characters, some of them will help you and some of them are just waiting for the moment to bring you down, very neat in overall.

The Bad
I really felt annoyed by the bloody disc swapping system, when you had to travel from a location to another one that 'insert disc' screen showed up, maybe having divided the game in two parts (CD1 and CD2) would have been more comfortable. There is a little inconvenient i found, maybe there is too much content in the dialogues and that can become boring in some situations.

The Bottom Line
If you like games like Gabriel Knight or other mystery/investigation games you should try Broken Sword, a masterpiece.

Windows · by Depth Lord (934) · 2004

Shadow of the Templars is best described as a "diet coke" of the Adventure genre, only with much better aftertaste.

The Good
Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars (BS:SotT) is your standard graphic adventure game in which you play the role of George Stobbart, a young American tourist on vacation through Europe that gets caught up in a rather nasty murder investigation in Paris and a eight century old mystery that'll span over Europe. I found the story to be interesting, well written (with a couple of nice plot twists) and slightly educational to boot.

Like I said, throughout your adventure you'll get to visit several other countries besides France, although your visit to them won't be as in depth as Paris, but then again when you look at games that have world travel (Like Gabriel Knight) you'll find that they don't expand beyond the necessary much either. The spotlight is on Paris, it is the center of the game, and most of the adventure will take place there. I mean, sure it would have been nice to see Spain in depth, but would it have really added anything to the story? If anything I think people would consider it a tactic to lengthen the game.

Gameplay in BS:SotT is the typical point-and-click-inventory-based-hot-spot-seeking-puzzle-extravaganza that you can expect to find in an adventure game (not that I'm complaining).

The interface couldn't be simpler or easier to use. Moving your mouse over hot spots will reveal a possible action that will be carried out by pressing the left hand button, while using the right hand one will give you brief description of whatever it is you're looking at. That said there are some pixel hunting moments that will frustrate you. If it's of any consolation, I didn’t find it terrible enough to damper my enjoyment of the game. You'll just have to exercise a little patience and move the mouse slowly.

The puzzle difficulty seems just about right to me. Shortly after a few hours of playing I recall saying to myself that the puzzles were WAY too easy, that however changed later on, for as you progress in the game the puzzles will become more difficult. Unfortunately in some cases the difficulty was in the obscurity of the puzzles, and you might be forced to track down a walkthrough, but there are still plenty of good logical puzzles to solve.

The game was released in 96, when computer game graphics where passing their FMV/SVGA graphics craze/phase and look a tad more than cartoonish, yet this isn't anything new as other adventure titles of the year use this style as well (Discworld 2, Fable, Gene Machine...). I know these graphics don't appeal much too some people, but regardless of Graphical preference I think they are well done and fit well with the overall ambiance of the game (which wasn't nearly as dark and gloomy as I had originally expected it to be).

In the sound department I have absolutely no complaints, the voice acting was surprisingly good, and sound was... well, sound... let me put it this way, you won't be clutching your ears in pain or turning it off. It was good, not sure what else to say about it. Music, finally, was in my opinion the better done of the three; it added that extra bit of dramatic feel at some crucial moments and some nice light listening when wandering about.

The Bad
I was a little disappointed that we didn't get to visit Germany, Italy or Greece (though they were marked on the map). But, to tell you the truth if asked how to implement them I wouldn't know where to begin (and I don’t even know if those nations had anything to do with the Templars).

The only thing that really bothered me about BS:SotT is that it can't quite make up its mind weather it wants to be a serious murder/mystery or a lighthearted comedy/parody, so it tries to be both without really succeeding in either. I think if the game had been done in a solely serious manner, it would have been much more popular than it is already.

Ok, I lied, that wasn’t the only thing that really bothered me, there's one more. I'm not really sure what George's motivation to find the killer is. Let me clarify: George's taking a trip through Europe on his vacation, he decides to have a cup of coffee at a little coffee shop in Paris when it is suddenly blow up by a clown, claiming the life of one guy he knew absolutely nothing about. He COULD have gone on with his vacation through Europe, yet he decided to track the killer down instead. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I'm reassessing my desire to visit Europe.

The Bottom Line
BS:SotT is an interesting and enjoying game that I would recommend to any fan of the genre, unfortunately, I think it tried to be/do way too many things at once to make a durable lasting impression.

Basically, if you're looking for a comedy game, get Discworld Noir. If you want a serious murder/mystery, get Gabriel Knight. If you want a little of both, get Broken Sword.

Windows · by Gonchi (3590) · 2009

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 (181780) · 2014

[ View all 13 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 March 19, 2024.