Broken Sword 5 - the Serpent's Curse is a point and click adventure game that follows the adventures of the art insurance claims adjuster George Stobbart, and his girlfriend but not really, journalist Nico Collard. The two of them find themselves in Paris at an art show, where the mysterious painting known as La Malediccio gets stolen. What follows is a story of fraud, religion, and murder, where George and Nico must unravel the mystery and discover who is responsible.
The most noticeable thing about the Broken Sword 5 when it first starts is the art style. It looks as though the game is taking place in a painting, which makes sense considering the story is based around a piece of artwork. The backgrounds are vibrant and still, save for a bird flying in the sky here or there. Interestingly enough, it's also one of the few games in history where the cutscenes look worse than the real time graphics. The cutscenes all look muddy and out of focus, which is jarring when they are transitioned to and from. Thankfully there are only a scarce few cutscenes in the game, so most of the time is spent looking at the lovely in game artwork.
The story of Broken Sword 5 tries to hit a lot of notes, but ultimately feels unfocused. It begins with George attempting to track down the rightful owner of La Malediccio, and ends with a man attempting to raise Lucifer to destroy Jehovah. Not exactly a natural progression. The game was originally released as two separate chapters, and split up the differing stories make more sense: the first chapter dedicated to the insurance fraud scandal, and the second to the religious significance of the painting. But when the chapters are paired as one game, the story drags on and on. The sense of dragging is not helped when there are far too often long dialogue heavy exchanges between actual gameplay sections. Many minutes can pass between button presses, and Broken Sword 5's story is too predictable and not engaging enough for the game to get away with it.
The gameplay is standard point and click adventure stuff. Unlike many other games in the genre, however, Broken Sword 5 attempts to be as straightforward as possible. Many solutions to puzzles are fairly easy to find, and the game will not allow you to leave an area until you have solved all the puzzles and gathered all the items you need to. This helps to avoid the worry that there may be something else in a different area that you may need to solve a puzzle in the area you're currently in. Even any dialogue puzzles are solved simply by just choosing every available option. The best thing Broken Sword 5 does is immediately leave an area when you click on an exit, rather than wait for the character to walk over to the exit. This is nice because George and Nico have no idea what urgency means, and will always walk as slow as possible even when, say, chasing after a kidnapper and his victim. All in all, most players won't have too much trouble with the puzzles.
That is, however, until a couple puzzles toward the end. The first takes place in a fully blackened cave where you need to find a light source. The interactable area of an item is very small in Broken Sword 5 as it is, and when you put the items in pitch black it makes it that much more frustrating to find them. That puzzle slows the pace of a the game to a crawl. The second puzzle then grinds it to a full stop. It requires you to translate markings into english using a guide. The problem is that no markings that you are translating actually appear on the guide. The game expects you to make some very large assumptions on what the markings actually mean in order to solve the puzzle. It is a very out of place ramping up of difficulty in a game that otherwise is mostly uncomplicated and easy for a point and click game.
Broken Sword 5 is a great game to introduce someone who is unsure about point and click adventure games to the genre. The puzzles are fairly easy to solve and the game isn't going to purposefully try and misdirect you. If you're a veteran of the genre then there probably isn't going to be much here to entice you. You will find the puzzles too easy, and the story will become long and predictable if you don't play the two chapters separately with a break in between.