A few years ago, I recorded a blind Let’s Play of Broken Sword: The Angel of Death. The result was hours of documented torment. The footage captured me losing my temper repeatedly; at one point I even slammed my desk audibly. I hated the experience so much that I decided to retaliate in the pettiest way I could: by making every video thumbnail feature a character blinking. Like those cursed photographs where you blink and look like a fool, I wanted the game itself to look dimwitted.
When I reached the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul, I tried to catch a palace guard mid-blink—but failed. Although he closed his eyes, he kept staring back at me through the freeze-frame. I soon realized why: the graphic designer had mistakenly mapped eye textures onto the character model’s eyelids. Even with his eyes shut, he was still looking straight at me. It felt as if the developers had seen my footage and patched in a half-hearted countermeasure. I promptly chose another victim and cursed the game for denying me even this small pleasure at its expense.
Returning to Broken Sword: The Angel of Death—George and Nico’s fourth globe-trotting adventure—reminds me exactly why I consider it the worst game I’ve ever finished. Revisiting it feels like returning to the site of a personal trauma. Every location is a mess. Even when you know precisely what to do, you can spend ages wrestling with the game to perform the correct input. By the end, you don’t feel challenged—you feel inexplicably older and dumber.
MORE THAN A HANDFUL OF MISTAKES
The first mistake is the controls. Simply moving around is stressful. Point-and-click adventures traditionally promise a relaxed posture: one hand on the mouse, the other… elsewhere. Here, as in the previous entry, the game insists on a fully 3D engine, developed with assistance from Sumo Digital. Controlled with both mouse and keyboard, the character lurches around erratically, like someone freshly disembarked from a malfunctioning merry-go-round.
The second mistake is the camera. You have no control over it. It pans, zooms, tilts, and shifts angles entirely on its own. This is exacerbated by poor location design. Classic adventure games operate under an unspoken agreement: important objects are clearly visible within a frame, and the player’s task is to solve the puzzle. Here, vital items are often hidden—not from George’s perspective, but from the player’s. Because of awkward angles and distance, crucial objects can appear so small and insignificant that you don’t even register their existence. One puzzle, in particular, requires placing George in an exact spot just to make a sign visible to the camera—otherwise, you’d never know it was there.
The third mistake lies in the puzzle design. The Broken Sword series’ infamous “examine everything” compulsion reaches its absolute nadir here. Fail to inspect the right object, and entire conversation branches—and thus progress—remain locked. Often, the player understands the solution long before George does, resulting in endless attempts to make him catch up. Eventually, you begin to doubt the correct solution and wander off on pointless tangents.
The fourth mistake is the writing. While some flaws can be blamed on publisher pressure from THQ, this one belongs squarely to Revolution. The core plot—entangling the Mafia and the Catholic Church—is serviceable enough, aside from its abrupt ending. The dialogue and characters, however, are appallingly written. In a misguided attempt at humor, the script leans heavily on cheap one-liners, stereotypes, and juvenile sexual innuendo, all delivered with painful earnestness.
The fifth mistake is the complete failure to communicate progress. Solve a puzzle and a door somewhere across the map may unlock without any indication. The hacking mini-game—the single best mechanic in the entire experience—might suddenly become available with no feedback whatsoever. You can exhaust a location and still have no idea where to go next. Given how absurdly large these areas are, this leads to endless, joyless backtracking.
The sixth mistake is the visual presentation. Everything is drab and gloomy, clashing violently with the game’s supposedly lighthearted tone. Many environments are smothered in brown or grey filters that drain all life from the screen. Textures are sparse and inconsistent, dominated by rock, brick, and concrete. Character models are stiff and awkward, a flaw made painfully clear during unflattering cinematic close-ups.
WORST GAME
For me, Broken Sword: The Angel of Death represents the absolute low watermark of commercially released adventure games. A perfect storm of poor decisions and inept execution turns it into an almost dysphoric experience. At this point, Revolution were industry veterans, yet the sheer volume of mistakes makes the game feel like the work of amateurs.
Nothing works. The controls are dreadful. The writing is awful. The dialogue is unskippable. Sound effects are sometimes missing entirely. Even basic pointing and clicking fails, as the cursor frequently refuses to register objects. Only the music lives up to the series’ legacy—and even that becomes tainted by association.
Replaying the game only reinforces my conviction that this is the worst title I’ve ever seen through to the end. Earlier entries were difficult in an abstract, cerebral way; this one is difficult because its characters are irrational and stupid. One infamous puzzle requires George to impersonate a German-accented health inspector—despite having spoken to the same people minutes earlier in his perfectly normal American accent.
It is both baffling and depressing to watch this franchise—and, by extension, much of the genre—shed its identity in a desperate attempt to keep up with the times. Revolution themselves seem to agree. Unlike the first two games, this one has never received a remake, director’s cut, remaster, or even a console port. It was quietly shuffled into the darker corners of the internet, presumably to extract a bit of revenue from die-hard completionists like myself.
Take it from someone who cares: this game is infinitely skippable.
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