Broken Sword 2
Spoiler warnings inbound! Proceed at own risk!
Yeah, the beginning and the end of this text is straight from the Broken Sword text. A lot of my feelings for this game seems straight from the prequel too. In all I remember the prequel as having a nicer story though. At any rate it felt less disjointed and more as a whole. The more humorous parts and settings in BS2 just felt wrong to me, with a basic story like this they don't do the mood any good at all. And the ending theme is pretty nice on its own, but what does it have to do with the game story anyway?
As for puzzles, this game seems very much about tampering with locked doors. Cell doors, mansion doors, museum doors (both entrances and exits), Mayan pyramid doors, locker doors, elevator doors ... You name the door, there's probably one here for you to tamper with! There seems to be a slightly undue amount of being mean to annoying people to take stuff from them as well. Even George himself comments on the sillyness of some situations, so I think it's safe to say the quality of the puzzles have gone down a bit over they years. Still, you do get to feel clever from time to time, and that's never wrong.
On the positive side the number of sudden death situations has been decreased nicely to just two. It's still a little too much for my taste, death still don't belong in adventure games if you ask me, but I can live with it. They don't come right after a long unskippable piece of dialogue anymore and that's an improvement.
Another distinct flashback from the past: my feelings about the ending! Actually this one's a bit worse. You find your way through some of the least inspired door puzzles in the game (pulling levers, no less), and come up to a doorway. George (who still looks a little dumb throughout most of this game) throws his torch and says a few tension building words about reaching the heart of darkness or similar. Then he finally walks through to the big, climactical ending, the final confrontation with the bad guys. Or so you hope. Actually it's the ending film clip that, even though full of action and with a pretty good flow in itself, completely fails to live up to your expectations. No sense of danger, no sense of awe for the tremendous forces that's being tampered with and especially: no interaction. If you're going to watch an ending movie you at least want to feel like you've earned it by actually contributing to the end of the game somehow.
Ah well, getting there was still a pleasant ride. Mostly nice puzzles, some of them involving doors, a few times of getting stuck (once for missing a rather obvious item, once for something that actually seemed like a bug). There's actually a little replay value as well, there are a few items that it seems very easy not to pick up as you pass them but that you can't do without later on. Much later. So late, in fact, that you can't go back and pick them up. I wonder what happens if you don't find them yourself ... Don't think it's anything that'll make me replay in the immediate future anyway ...
Once again, I'm afraid Revolution did better with Beneath a Steel Sky in some ways, and the first Broken Sword as well ...
