Broken Sword 2 - the Smoking Mirror: Remastered (2010)

I came to this one straight off the back of Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars, which set an almost unfairly high bar. The Smoking Mirror drops you into the action faster - George is knocked out and tied up within minutes, Nico vanishes into a drug-ring conspiracy, and the pace barely lets up from there. That urgency is genuinely exciting at first. The problem is Revolution built this sequel in under a year, and that rush shows in ways the Remastered edition can polish but not fully fix. The core loop is classic point-and-click: guide George (and occasionally Nico in separate segments) through a third-person 2D world, collect objects, combine them, exhaust dialogue trees, inch the mystery forward. Locations range from the rain-soaked docks of Marseilles to a sun-baked Central American jungle and a Caribbean island, and the hand-drawn art holds up well - the cartoon-adjacent style ages far better than the 3D entries that followed. Where the Remastered edition genuinely earns its keep is in the additions it brings to the original 1997 release: redesigned backgrounds, fully animated facial expressions, an in-game diary to track your progress, and a context-sensitive hint system that escalates from gentle nudges to step-by-step guidance without penalising you. That hint system is quietly one of the best quality-of-life decisions in adventure game history. It lets newcomers stay in the story without reaching for a walkthrough, which matters a lot in a genre famous for pixel-hunting dead ends. The puzzles themselves are a mixed bag. Some are clever and satisfying; others are obtuse in the arbitrary way that gave 90s adventure games their difficult reputation. A few combination actions cannot be triggered until specific dialogue has been unlocked, which means you can have the right items and the right idea and still be stuck because you skipped a conversation branch. There is also no fast travel between scenes, so backtracking slows things down more than it should. On the flip side, George's dry wit and the script's overall quality carry a lot of weight - the voice acting is solid throughout and the banter makes even throwaway NPC interactions worth clicking through. A known audio quirk worth mentioning: headphone users may find dialogue comes out of one ear only, a port-era issue that some players work around by switching their system to mono audio. As a sequel, The Smoking Mirror falls short of its predecessor in character writing and puzzle design. The new cast of supporting characters is thinner, and the main antagonist barely registers. But taken as a standalone 6-to-8-hour point-and-click mystery with a globe-trotting structure, witty dialogue, and a hint system that genuinely respects your time, it holds up better than its reputation suggests. If you finished the first game and want more of the same duo, you will find enough here to satisfy - just go in knowing this is a step down, not a step forward.

Alex · Scout Team

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