Point and Click and Meet and Greet

Well, what a world, aye? One minute you're talking about a game dev and how much you love his games about ghosts on your blog, and the next you're meeting him and another (BAFTA winning) adventure game dev in a pub full of indies.

AS ONE DOES.

But anyway, I leap ahead of myself. Video games I have been playing...

...are mostly members of the point and click adventure genre. Mostly, in fact, of the Broken Sword genre.

Nothing witty, just a reminder that Broken Sword is really pretty.

Why Broken Sword? Because of that KickStarter for Broken Sword 5 of course!

WAIT. There was a Broken Sword FOUR?!? When did this happen?!? 2006? Ah, in that case, it falls under my pre-2007, "I wasn't that into games then" rule. Phew.

Anyhow, in prep for Broken Sword 5, I decided to finally get round to playing Broken Sword 3. Because I haven't yet. But then I thought, fuck it. If I'm going to do this thing, I'm going to do it right. So I've been playing through the first two on my iPod on the train to work. COMMUTE GAMING.

Did I mention I have a new job? It's sort of an excuse for why I haven't been doing any writing recently. I'm now an Explainer at the Science Museum in London, which is pretty freakin' sweet to be honest.

Anyway. Broken Sword. Despite having played both games before, I've still enjoyed this run-through. The games are beautiful, but also feature a witty, intelligent plot that span continents. It did the Da Vinci code years before Dan Brown wrote his first cliff hanger, and did "Assassins Versus Templars" over a decade before Assassin's Creed. All of the puzzle solving feels natural, and although some puzzles require a fair bit of lateral thinking, it all still merges well into the story.

The one big problem with the Broken Sword games, or at least the ones I have played, is that they always fall flat in the final act. Shadow of the Templars has you finding some pointless items in a church so you can open a door followed by a cutscene, and Smoking Mirror sees you solving dull, uninspiring and ultimately TIME-WASTING puzzles before ANOTHER cutscene. It's a real shame, since the build up to these points is fantastic.

Outside of Templar and Mayan conspiracies, and back to what I was jabbering on about at the beginning, I was lucky enough to brush shoulders with some fantastic indie devs at a meet and greet organised by Dan Marshall. Who's Dan Marshall, I hear you cry? You might have heard of him, he made some games with Ben Ward. They are both incredibly friendly guys who didn't mind chatting to a nobody like me who had no business being there.

Also, Dave Gilbert was there. No, not my imagined adventure game amalgamation man, but the guy behind the Blackwell games. So yeah, I went from playing adventure games, to meeting the devs behind them. They turned out to be lovely people, and also look nothing like their in-game avatars. I don't know where I am going with this.

Also, this guy was there, and took pictures of a burger. Which was pretty weird.

Next time, I'm going to be shouting my mouth off about The Walking Dead games. BE THERE.