Circle of Blood
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)
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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)
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
one fine adventure game... and it's not from lucasarts !
The Good
There is something to enjoy in almost every aspect of "broken sword".
Graphics first... they're just amazing for the time, and still very find by today's standarts. Professionally animated characters evolve on beautifully drawn backgrounds.
Sounds... Well, the game featured full voice acting. And incredibly long dialogs, so it's pretty amazing they managed to put all this digitized speech on just two CDs. Music is also nice, though there are not so many moments when it can be heard.
Gameplay... The puzzles were of a fine level of difficulty. Nothing dreadfully illogical. Of course, it has a couple of challenging moments, but I think reasonably patient folks will not have to get the help of a walkthrough more than once or twice. And this will probably be during the few puzzles that require timing.
Story... the story is involving and draws you back to the game.
Lasting appeal... Well, once you've solved the game, you'll probably not come back, but the whole experience is decently long, so it's pretty good value for money.
The Bad
The graphics when you are in Paris are magnificent... but sometimes, when you're in other countries, they're slightly inferior (especially in Ireland)
The voice acting is sometimes a little questionnable.
The story is sometimes hard to understand, especially towards the end... it's not always easy to relate the clues you find to the conclusion your character is drawing.
The Bottom Line
This adventure game must not be ashamed when it is compared to Lucasarts masterpieces : they're on the same glorious level !
While the humour is far from being as wacky as, say, "monkey island", it's still very funny, because your character can't stop using light irony (at least light enough so it doesn't get irritating).
Solving the mystery of the temple knights is really a thrilling adventure I recommend to everyone.
Windows · by Xa4 (300) · 2003
The great game that might have been.
The Good
Voice actors do a good job with variety of accents, and the rest of the sound and music is also well done. The "An American Tale"-style graphic animation is a delightful respite from the legions of Myst-alikes that shared shelf space with this one when released. Although not up to Sierra/LucasArts standards, the plot and script are entertaining enough that you'll probably want to play this through to the end.
Looking back at it from the post-Da Vinci Code era, the first installment in this adventure series seems especially prescient. The whole Templers conspiracy plot, along with the quasi-romantic link between an American man and a French female, lays the template for the Code phenomenon—so much so that a part of me strongly suspects Dan Brown of plagiarizing this game!
The Bad
There is WAY too much pixel-hunting -- you might know what to do but still fail to do it because you have to put your mouse pointer in just the right (extremely small) place.
Some puzzles are not very logical. It's also possible to visit a location and get "stuck" there due to some of the disc-swapping that occurs when you travel abroad.
Finally, some attempts at humor fall flat on an American audience, and some actually render the game inappropriate for a young person. Sexual innuendo and anti-religious sentiments reflect this game's European origins.
The Bottom Line
A pleasant diversion that coulda-shoulda-woulda been a classic.
Windows · by PCGamer77 (3158) · 2007
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.
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Related Sites +
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Broken Sword 1 Hints
Helpful hints for solving Circle of Blood, the North American release of Broken Sword1 -
Circle of Blood - FAQs & Guides
Multiple walkthroughs and faq files (in various languages) on GameFaqs.com -
How to play in Windows XP
Hakan Larsson explains exactly how to do it -
ScummVM
Get "Broken Sword I", as well as many other adventure games, to run on modern systems by using ScummVM, a legal and free program. -
Walkthrough for Broken Sword - Shadow of the Templars
Full solution for Circle of Blood/Shadow of the Templars posted on Revolution's web site. -
Wikipedia: Circle of Blood
Article in the open encyclopedia
Identifiers +
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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.