Memories of our favourite video games often transcend the test of time. Our memories aren’t a true reflection of the pixel or audio quality; they’re fragmented, faded imprints that are far from accurate. What we truly remember is the essence of those moments and how they made us feel, and those powerful memories can last a lifetime.
When it comes to Broken Sword 2: The Smoking Mirror, my favourite title of an equally beloved series, the scene that has always stuck with me is Tezcatlipoca tearing himself out of the mirror. Even when I’d long forgotten the finer details of the narrative or specific puzzle solutions, the image of a Mayan deity – part skeleton, part muscle, and wholly disturbing – forcing his way out of the glass was seared into my mind for life.
As a child, I found it both terrifying and exciting, which sums up what made Broken Sword 2 my favourite. The first game had us gallivanting mostly in Europe (with the exception of Syria) with a historical focus and lore that felt very familiar, like the Knights Templar. Broken Sword 2 upped the ante by being more obscure and mysterious, focusing on Mayan legends as it took us to Central America and the Caribbean in addition to European cities. The stakes somehow felt higher, the path more dangerous, and as a result, the adventure all the more thrilling.
Reforged Over 20 Years Later
I was beyond excited when Broken Sword – Shadow of the Templars: Reforged was announced, a remaster of the first game in the series, which not only reworked the original material to improve it and smooth out a few small continuity wrinkles, but also reinvented the interface to revolutionise the point-and-click genre for modern audiences.
When I first met Revolution Software founder and Broken Sword creator Charles Cecil, one of the first questions to leave my lips was, “What about Broken Sword 2?” even though the team hadn’t even finished Reforged. Now, over two years since I first asked him that question, Cecil was finally able to confirm to me that The Smoking Mirror Reforged is now in development.
“I’m really proud of this,” Cecil tells me while showing the trailer for The Smoking Mirror Reforged. “This kind of feels like Disney-quality animation to me. We’ve just raised the ambition so much higher than what we did before.” And he’s not wrong. The animation is so clean and crisp, it’s undeniably impressive, especially when compared to Shadows of the Templar Reforged.
The first Reforged was an ambitious project that meant tracking down original artwork from 30 years ago, working with teeny tiny audio files that had been compressed beyond hope for much older consoles, and what essentially equated to a mammoth amount of work for a relatively small team.
As such, Revolution Software experimented with AI as a tool to help with some of the graphics, utilising it for some of the more mundane work so the artists could focus on the parts that mattered most, like the character expressions and hands. The use of AI is a contentious topic, with many reacting to it in the same way characters reacted to protagonist George Stobbart showing them a dirty tissue in the original Broken Sword: with displeasure.
The result was that, although Shadow of the Templars Reforged looked much better than the original, there were a few noticeable blips in the details of cutscenes that didn’t look as clean as they could have. Learning from this, Revolution Software has hand-drawn everything from scratch for The Smoking Mirror Reforged, so while the first Reforged had 30,000 frames of animation, the sequel will have 45,000.
30 years ago, Revolution Software worked with a Philippines-based company, Fil-Cartoons, to help with the animation. While the studio has in-house animators, the bulk of work meant it needed an experienced outsourcer, and Cecil tells me that for The Smoking Mirror Reforged, the team has once again outsourced to help with the workload.
“We were able to go back to the Philippines and a company called Friendly Foes, which kind of has its roots in the original Fil-Cartoons from 30 years ago,” he tells me. “In many ways, it’s extraordinary because we’ve got, in some cases, the same people animating that animated all those decades ago.
“We’ve got a wonderful team here. We’ve got a wonderful team in the Philippines. And our ambition is to absolutely future-proof this so that while people were playing the game 30 years ago and enjoying it, I hope that people will be playing in 30 years’ time because, as you can see, the amount of passion that we put into the animation in particular is extraordinary.”
Broken Sword 2 Suffered From Crunch
The original Broken Sword did phenomenally well, dominating a six-page spread in the Official PlayStation Magazine across multiple countries, receiving critical acclaim, and completely stormed past sales expectations. Despite this success, Revolution Software’s then-publisher didn’t have much confidence in continuing the series.
“When we wrote the game back in 1997, our publisher, Virgin [Interactive], felt that Adventures were very passe, and they said, ‘Look, it’s got to be finished in a year or we’re going to cancel it.’ That was their commercial decision at the time, so we did finish it within a year.”
As a result of the quick turnaround time, Cecil explains that there were “many shortfalls” in Broken Sword 2, highlighting one example in particular, being that “there aren’t nearly enough sound effects”. He tells me that he finds it exciting to be able to give Broken Sword 2 the Reforged treatment, as, despite the shortfalls, many players prefer this game over the original.
“We have the opportunity to revise that. We have the opportunity to put more parallax layers in. It’s the spirit of the game, but for a new audience, there’s the opportunity to put in more graphics, to put in more sound effects, [and] really to make it feel like it’s brought to life.”
Revolution Software, much like with the first Reforged, is using this as an opportunity to perfect every facet of the game and is bringing back cut lines or missing animations to facilitate that, while staying true to the original. Cecil tells me that there was originally an option to put a worm in your coffee and give it to a waiter, but this was cut as there was no animation for it when the team ran out of time. Now, it’s being added back in with a new animation to match.
The team is also addressing other little niggles, with Cecil pointing out to me that when in Ketch’s Museum, if you don’t read the log that says it’s easier for a rich man to pass through the eye of a needle, the next section of the game doesn’t make as much sense. This time around, the scripts will be recompiled to address this.
And it’s not just dialogue, but graphical details too. The opening is set in a scatty professor’s house, and yet the home is pristine. For The Smoking Mirror Reforged, documents and piles of books have been added to better reflect the character’s true personality. Additionally, on the wall there is a wedding photo of the professor and his wife, but Cecil points out that the groom “looks absolutely nothing like the in-game character”, and so the team have redrawn this.
Though not as divisive as the goat puzzle from the first game, the boar puzzle in Broken Sword 2 certainly frustrated many a gamer, and so I ask whether this will be included as it originally was. “The core problem was, first of all, it was a maze. As you went from one location to another, it was random which one you went into, which effectively meant that you stumbled onto the solution, which is never good. When we did Broken Sword 2 Reforged, we actually changed that.
“Now, the other thing is that from a graphic perspective, it wasn’t at all clear where some of the exits were in that particular swamp area, so we’ve improved that so that visually it’s quite clear. As far as the boar is concerned, I think it’s reasonable, like Nico being strangled, what we’re doing is we’re giving you enough time. I don’t think we’ll change that unless user feedback comes back and says that it’s unfair. Here and now, this is not something that we plan to change.”
When I ask how the idea for the sequel came about all those years ago, Cecil tells me, “We were looking to do a sequel fairly fast. We had to. I’d been to the British Museum and came across The Mask of Tezcatlipoca, which is still there, and it was used for the cover art. Tezcatlipoca is the Smoking Mirror, and the smoking mirror is an obsidian mirror. I think that the smoking element is the way the light falls on this polished obsidian mirror.
“The key to it was that, according to the Mayan calendar, the end of the world was coming in 2012. We had a few years before the end of the world, and, of course, it didn’t happen, which is just as well, but at the time, it kind of felt very edgy that the world was going to be ending in a few years’ time. It felt prescient, it felt timely. Then, of course, you have the bloodthirsty Mayans and the Aztecs, who used to sacrifice huge numbers of human beings. It just all came together really, really, really nicely.”
Cecil also tells me he wanted the game to feel “non-linear” to a degree, which is why players can hunt down the four stones in different locations in whatever order they wish, which also “reflected what we did in Broken Sword 1, which was to have the four quadrants of the manuscript, and each of those quadrants represented a location.”
Learning From The First Reforged
Revolution Software takes everything it learned from the original Reforged, implementing the same improvements, adding in the modernised interface and hint mechanics, and once again will be breathing new life into a classic. Fortunately, this time around, though the workload has increased by redrawing everything anew, the overall process has been a lot smoother.
For the first Broken Sword, the speech was compressed to 11 kilohertz and “compressed really amateurishly,” according to Cecil. Because the team no longer had the original speech, it was difficult to upscale it for Reforged.
Post-launch, the upscaling was redone with DX Revive for a much better quality result.
For Broken Sword 2, the original files were compressed to 22 kilohertz and were done professionally, giving the team a much stronger base point from which to work. “We’ve already run it through the process, and it sounds great. That was a big problem from last time that thankfully doesn’t exist this time around.”
Some of the original artwork for the first game was also lost over the years, making it more difficult to remaster. “Years ago, people would say, ‘Oh, I love Broken Sword. Can you give me one of the backgrounds?’” Cecil explains. “And I did, and then they got lost. For Broken Sword 1, there were a number of locations that we simply didn’t have. For Broken Sword 2, I believe we have them all.”
Having already gone through the Reforging process before, the team has perfected the process. “Because we knew what the workflow was, we went in, scanned them all, and then if there were problems in relation to animation or perspective, we fixed them at that stage and then repainted them from scratch. The big difference is that with Broken Sword 1 [Reforged], it was a mixture of AI and hand-painting.
“We’ve gone through the process, taking the original line art, tweaking it if necessary, because sometimes you get perspective differences, sometimes the characters look like they’ve grown too much or too little or whatever, and gone through a much more ordered process. The result is just more beautiful, much more beautiful.”
With me being the eager beaver I am, I couldn’t resist asking about Revolution Software’s other plans. Cecil tells me that Broken Sword: Parzival’s Stone, the sixth entry in the series, is still in the works and is being fully funded by Revolution, but emphasises “it’s still way, way, way off”.
As for potential other Reforged titles, which would seem like a no-brainer if the second is as successful as the first, Cecil tells me that Broken Sword 3 with its change to 3D would provide “a completely different challenge” for the team, but that he has given it some thought. He says it’s “something that we are really excited to explore” but that Revolution Software is taking it one step at a time.
While The Smoking Mirror Reforged is already well underway in development, Revolution Software will be gauging interest for another potential Kickstarter, much like the first that proved to be incredibly successful. The team plans to wait for the first Reforged project to be completely buttoned up so we all have our gorgeous George figures in hand, but if there is an appetite for the sequel, they plan to once again offer collector editions for avid fans via Kickstarter, with the hopes that the additional funding will allow them “to be more ambitious in the game itself”.
I’ve recently been prompted to finalise my shipping details for Kickstarter for the first Reforged, and so it feels like perfect timing to go on yet another journey with Revolution Software, and especially for the game I hold most dear in the series. Cecil promises that if the next Kickstarter goes ahead, he plans to share more behind-the-scenes information and personal updates, as he enjoyed the enthusiasm and interactions with the community so much.
“Broken Sword 2 [Reforged], I think, is going to be the better game, because story-wise, it’s more solid,” Cecil says. “We are improving it substantially because of the constraints that we had to make at the time, and graphically, it is much, much more ambitious than Broken Sword 1 [Reforged]. I hope that it will be every bit as well-received, maybe even better.”
The Smoking Mirror Reforged aims to launch early next year, simultaneously on all platforms, with the Nintendo Switch version offering an upgrade for the Nintendo Switch 2 that utilises the Joy-Con mouse controls.
I’m incredibly excited to retrace my steps with George and Nico across the world once more, and most importantly, I can’t wait to see the Reforged version of the scene of Tezcatlipoca coming out of the mirror that utterly charmed me all those years ago.
