Go back to Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon

Written by: Rik
Date posted: October 16, 2010

If there’s one thing that’s going to annoy you about Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon more than anything else, it’s the realisation that a crate-moving puzzle is never far away.

Now, I can sort of understand that in a game like this there may be cause to move the occasional box-shaped object out of the way, even if the situation is slightly more contrived than might be realistic due to the fact that this is, you know, a game.

Here, though, there are bloody crates around every corner, in the kind of places you wouldn’t normally expect to find crates. Early on, it’s not such a problem – you shift a couple out of the way here and there, and Bob’s your uncle. Fine. Obviously, though, things get a bit harder as you progress, and by the end you’re negotiating labyrinthine mazes with strategically-placed crates (or boxes, or other box-shaped objects) in the way or indeed faced with a big room full of crates that you need to shift around in a certain way in order to progress.

The ‘rules’ of the puzzle mean that you’re limited in how you move the crates – so, for example, if there’s one crate on top of another, you can’t reach the top one down, you have to construct a path of crates below in order to ‘slide’ it out of the way. This represents the major challenge in many of the later crate-moving scenarios, at which point your patience is likely to wear thin, especially when you bear in mind that you normally have at least one other person with you who could probably help you move those tricky, high-up crates but choose instead to stand motionless while George spends hours shifting the crates one at a time.

Still, it’s no surprise: that Nico’s always been a little bit lazy.

Here you are, at the end of the game, with four minutes to save the world. Hurry! There’s no time to lose!

 

But first, we need to move all of these crates and get over this wall. No, don’t help Nico, it won’t take long…