Originally released in 1996, the conspiracy-laden Broken Sword comes with a surprising amount of modern conveniences - if this is thanks to the Director's Cut edition or not I couldn't tell you, but I will tell you this: I can see why people were so crazy about this game back in the day.
It feels very streamlined: the ability to skip puzzles to reduce frustration when you're stuck, hot spots on the screen to indicate what's clickable or not to cure the point-and-click-on-everything-disease that plagued so many of its contemporaries, fully voiced dialogue (although, admittedly, this one is a bit rough in spots) and a tiered hint system that let's you progress through the game with hints ranging from a gentle nudge in the right direction to straight up telling you what you need to do. You'll never need to look at a walkthough and if you've played these kinds of games before, you won't really get stuck at all, which let's you concentrate on the story instead.
If you, like me, jump in cold and have no idea what this game is about, but still have some academic interest in playing it, you'll be happy to hear that it doesn't feel way too old at this point. It's actually surprisingly easy to get in to.
The story takes some interesting twists along the way and the presentation is fantastic: this is how I would imagine what it would be like to play a digital comic book. Between some scenes (note: as much as I'd like to, I'll refrain from calling them 'panels') they've also injected hand drawn animations. These look as if they were taken straight from a cartoon movie, and it all flows together nicely, even though the art style is all over the place and doesn't really know what it's trying to do.
Indeed, some things (like subtitles) do stick out like a soar thumb and the different graphical styles rarely come together to make a whole, but it's something I'm willing to forgive.
All in all, this is a great release for those of us who never played Broken Sword back in the day and have no idea what it's about.