Broken Sword 3 - the Sleeping Dragon (2003)

One of my all time favorite comfort games. If a game was a lazy summer day, it would be this one. Every time I load it up I'm back at my old house with a breeze blowing through the open window, my dad is still alive, and the world still seems okay.

great game!

The franchise was never great on puzzles, but this one dropped the ball by substituting most of them with so many banal crate shoving rooms, "action" scenes, "platforming" and terrible stealth sequences. Because, of course, 2003, what else was there to do for point & click adventures than to turn into ugly 3D action games with poor controls? Though to be fair, this one doesn't look and play all that badly. Had it had some more actual puzzles, it could've been a solid entry, but, well, it hadn't. The story is all over the place and terribly drawn out, but they managed to make the characters a little more likable. I played it back then and I replayed it now and can see why I didn't remember anything about it ... it's totally forgettable.

Returning to this 20+ years later, more of it works than I expected. George and Nico remain a delight, as do the many weirdos they encounter. They're such a joy to spend time with, even if the character traits they're given in service of early 2000s humour feel clumsy, like Nico's flippant callousness and George's awkward, possessive jealousy. I also could have done without the under baked Chosen One angle for George. He works best as the every man who just happens to be there and doesn't need anything more than that to earn his place. The move to 3D is basically a bust, with a reliance on block puzzles that borders on obsession and too many instances of tedious traversal, but despite low detail polygons being a poor substitute for high detail illustrations, environments are still compelling and have enough of that Broken Sword vibe to carry them through. Shout out to the music too. It's not Barrington Pheloung but it has the same spirit of adventure and ties everything together nicely.

this game freezes my computer so routinely and it makes it so I cant get to task manager either so sometimes I have to force shut down. I only have 1 screen so I cant just move over to another one. I lose tons of progress every time I have to shut down. so the 4 hours I have played is probably closer to 8 at this point

Garbage