It's hard to imagine a game as defiantly old-fashioned as Broken Sword 5: The Serpent's Curse being released without the help of crowdfunding. While it bears the sharp high-definition visuals and steep production values of a modern game, you could just as easily imagine playing it under a veil of blocky pixels and low-fi voice acting. Most publishers wouldn't even give it a chance. Today's adventure game is less point-and-click, and more interactive story; the challenge of esoteric, abstract-thinking puzzles dumbed down in favour of a more accessible narrative.
This isn't always a bad thing of course: just look at the likes of Telltale Games' brilliant The Wolf Among Us and The Walking Dead. But the Kickstarter successes of Broken Sword 5 and Double Fine Adventure in 2012 showed that there's a small, but dedicated group out there that crave the challenging puzzles and quirky dialogue of a late-'80s and early-'90s adventure game. It's thanks to the likes of Kickstarter, Apple's App Store, and the openness of the PC platform, that these games can find a home.
For Charles Cecil MBE, famed developer and creator of the Broken Sword series, it was specifically Kickstarter and Apple's App Store that were the catalyst for reviving his company Revolution Software. iOS remasters of classic point-and-click games like Beneath a Steel Sky and Broken Sword sold well on the App Store, and set the company on a path towards its Kickstarter success with Broken Sword 5, a game that brought in nearly $800,000 (£500,000) and attracted over 14,000 backers.
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