Part II of Broken Sword 5: The Serpent's Curse picks up the thread from Part I immediately and pushes George Stobbard and Nico Collard to parts unknown as they race after a Gnostic mystery that may or may not plunge the world into chaos.
Nothing about Part II feels like it was tweaked or tightened up in any way. Gaps between character exchanges make the conversations seem stilted and awkward. And if you haven't played any of the other Broken Sword games the cameos of characters from previous titles will have little impact. Those two aspects of the game are its biggest weaknesses, especially for newcomers. (I still haven't had time to go back to try some of the older titles in the series!)
Fortunately, the overall setting and puzzle solving might be better than Part I, aside from one puzzle that forced me to the Internet to find the solution. At one point George and Nico get locked in a Gnostic chapel and escape hinges on correctly deciphering a code with the aid of a translation sheet. It's a puzzle that instigated some doodling and figuring on a real world piece of paper (with a pencil!) what the translation was. but I was tripped up on a couple of pieces of the code. I spent, literally, 90 minutes trying to trial and error my way to the solution after my code-breaking skills failed me. Aside from that one puzzle, most every other puzzle can be completed with a little "adventure think." Need to complete that circuit? How about that paper-clip and the ever-helpful cockroach? Oh, the clip doesn't stay attached to the roach. What's around here that I can use to secure it? There's nothing purely "logical" about anything other than thinking, "The game won't let me out of this area, so I must have everything I need in this room or I already have it in my inventory." The rest if it can be guess work.
One aspect of Broken Sword 5 that I really appreciated was the seemingly hand-drawn backgrounds. With a couple of the vistas we get here, I was reminded of King's Quest V (1990) though obviously with sharper detail and in much higher resolution. While just playing an adventure is often enough to give me the warm and fuzzies, when it reminds me of a game I played in EGA -- you remember, 16 glorious colours -- it's like a hot flash of nostalgia.
Since this is the concluding part of the game likely the main question on everyone's mind is, "How's the ending?" I liked the ending just fine but the lead-up to the finale features a leap of logic that even for an adventure game I found hard to swallow.
Nico's hanging from a gondola and a gunman is stopping her from climbing up. One philosophical exchange later and the gunman turns on his boss and murders him at point blank range allowing Nico to clamber up. Mere minutes later, George and Nico accept a ride in the plane of this lunatic, with said lunatic at the controls. That's a difficult leap to make!
Aside from that, Part II of The Serpent's Curse is a fun adventure game that this writer can recommend to gamers looking for a few laughs and a thinking experience -- aside from the puzzles, I'd knew nothing of Gnosticism (even through the lens of a game) so there was some reading to do after the credits rolled.
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The Good:
- Backgrounds are like a hot flash of nostalgia
- One puzzle turned into a real brain-stumper, everything else can be solve with "adventure think"
- Really came to like the George and Nico
- Some laughs
The Bad:
- Some of the character interactions/dialogue just isn't as smooth as it should be
- One leap in logic that's really hard to accept
