NEW TIMES FOR THE OLD WAYS
It’s all about keeping up with the times — and what better way to do that than by adding a radical third dimension? Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon is the third entry in Revolution Software’s long-running adventure series, and the one that dared to make the leap into 3D.
With the breakthrough of home consoles, Revolution felt compelled to adapt. Without mouse control, point-and-click was no longer considered a viable interface. Console controllers were built around direct, continuous control over characters and actions. Revolution embraced that idea and tried to inject more action into the formula, presumably to appeal to a younger audience. The big question was how much of the Broken Sword spirit would be lost in translation.
“Not too much,” I once thought — but returning sixteen years later, The Sleeping Dragon feels like a visually impaired experiment, compromised on multiple levels. It’s not outright bad, but it often feels half-baked. With the benefit of hindsight, I’d call it an adventure game on life support: still alive, but with a bleak prognosis. What makes this especially sad is that Revolution’s classic point-and-click interface might actually have been one of the easiest to adapt to consoles, thanks to its clean and streamlined design. Instead, we got a 3D graphical adventure that consistently underdelivers.
OLD ARCHEOLOGICAL MYSTERIES AND NEW PUZZLES
The story keeps archaeological investigation at its core, but spices it up with supernatural elements. The plot is engaging and carried by the series’ trademark character banter. It draws on real-world concepts like the Voynich manuscript, the Earth’s ley lines, and an ailing old man obsessed with uncovering the secret of eternal youth. His egotistical quest threatens the entire planet, and stopping him falls to you.
The protagonists, George Stobbart (voiced by Rolf Saxon, excellent as ever) and Nicole Collard (Sarah Crook), begin separated by an entire continent. Despite this, they share the same sense of looming danger and inevitably find their paths converging.
George starts out as a passenger on a small freight plane bound for the Congo, where he’s set to meet a scientist named Cholmondeley. An unexpected electrical storm brings the flight down, leaving George and the pilot stranded on the edge of a cliff. Their escape introduces a brand-new mechanic to the series: platforming.
Calling it “puzzling” is generous. There is no real challenge here. George can’t miss a jump or fall to his death — invisible walls prevent it — and his infinite stamina allows him to climb indefinitely. The only requirement is pressing the correct buttons and following the single viable path forward.
This opening sequence also foreshadows The Sleeping Dragon’s most infamous addition: Tomb Raider-inspired box-pushing puzzles. They are plentiful, painfully obvious, and still take far too long to complete. Worst of all is the realization that they occupy design space that could have been used for something far more imaginative.
NICO IN TROUBLE WITH THE LAW
Meanwhile, Nicole is back in Paris, meeting a hacker who claims to have been hired to decode an ancient manuscript. Her troubles begin the moment she reaches his apartment and hears a gunshot through the door. Inside, she finds the hacker dead — and evidence suggesting someone has impersonated her in order to frame her for the murder.
This section focuses on the investigative gameplay that traditionally defines the series. Nico must talk to witnesses and gather evidence before the police arrive. Unfortunately, without a mouse cursor, these sequences become unnecessarily awkward. Instead of carefully examining her surroundings, you’re forced to jog around the environment in search of hotspots.
Movement itself is clumsy and imprecise. With direct control and faster character movement, Revolution also made the questionable choice to scale up every location. The camera can’t display an entire area at once, and as you approach the edge of the screen it frequently shifts perspective. The result is that Nico suddenly changes direction mid-stride, often zigzagging awkwardly across the screen as you try to reorient yourself.
THE ALLURE OF 3D
This is the great temptation of 3D for designers with cinematic ambitions. Perspective and camera control allow for a more film-like presentation than the static, stage-play framing of classic point-and-click adventures. The Sleeping Dragon indulges heavily in close-ups during cutscenes — unfortunately, the character models haven’t aged well. Slightly stylized but not stylized enough, they end up trapped in an uncomfortable middle ground between realism and caricature.
Tonally, the game often stumbles. On the one hand, characters behave in a cartoonish manner; on the other, they’re confronted with genuine danger and death. George and Nico are intelligent and well-read, yet sometimes display a near-psychopathic detachment — cracking jokes beside a fresh corpse, casually commenting on exposed entrails. The intention was clearly to evoke the lighthearted tone of an Indiana Jones adventure, but those films never felt this tone-deaf.
Even more disappointing is the loss of environmental artistry. In the best 2D adventures, hand-drawn backgrounds were essential to world-building. Here, the 3D environments resemble dated studio sets wrapped in low-resolution textures. Identical doors, dead ends, and visual noise turn exploration into a chore rather than a pleasure.
SUMMARY AND A FAREWELL
There are moments where Revolution proves they still know how to design great puzzles. One standout involves a ferryman tasked with transporting a murderer, a witness, and a vengeful brother across a river — one at a time. Other highlights include chambers where you must align the Earth’s energy to open new paths. These are among the strongest puzzles in the entire series, but they mostly serve as reminders of what Broken Sword in three dimensions could have been.
Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon was a sincere attempt to modernize the series and appeal to a console-focused audience. In doing so, it lost much of its identity. Other genres absorbed the lessons of adventure games — storytelling, dialogue, puzzle logic, world-building — and evolved into compelling adventures in their own right. That transition felt as natural as the move to 3D, and mirrored my own gradual migration away from traditional adventure games.
The graphical adventure never truly disappeared, but it was quietly pushed into a niche corner of the industry. It enjoyed a brief resurgence with the rise of Telltale Games, but that chapter has closed as well. Perhaps the future lies in handheld devices, where touchscreens finally realize the purest form of point-and-click.
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