1. Broken Sword
Broken Sword is another Revolution Software game which came after Beneath a Steel Sky and featured a completely different gaming style. Instead of the darker approach taken in Steel Sky, Broken Sword mostly takes place in very bright, colourful locales with a somewhat more upbeat approach to its humour to go along with its mostly serious storyline. Perhaps due to looking almost like an animated Disney movie, Broken Sword is arguably one of the most famous point and click adventures that has been made. And rightly so. Its story, puzzles, voice acting, graphics and music were all brilliant, leading it to gain numerous ports over the years. Playing as American tourist George Stobbart (with help from Parisian journalist Nico Collard) it is a truly epic story spanning from an explosion in Paris all the way across the globe unraveling a Templar conspiracy with some tomb raiding and murder mystery along the way. Broken Sword took everything that games like Monkey Island did before it but expanded on them and did it all on an even larger scale. Not incredibly difficult but certainly not easy, Broken Sword is quite an accessible game and one of those with a story good enough to be a movie in its own right. In recent years a "Directors Cut" came out for Nintendo consoles and mobile devices that fleshed out the story even more and added new puzzles to the original. It was a huge commercial success and spawned a sequel (Smoking Mirror) that was almost as good as the first but didn't quite capture the magic. "The Sleeping Dragon" was a third installment in which the game moved into 3D territory for the first time in a move that turned off a lot of people. However, like Syberia it was still a very good point and click game that brought the genre firmly into the more modern era, even if it did have the most over the top ending of the three. The fourth game was another fair installment in the series though the original still could not be touched in terms of sheer quality across the board. For the upcoming 5th entry, Revolution have returned to the 2D style that helped make the first game so popular. As evidenced by the success of the Kickstarter campaign, fans are confident that this new installment can be just as good as the 4 that preceded it. Whether it can outdo the first game is unlikely but Revolution have proved over the years that they, like Lucas Arts, have a knack for making fantastic point and click games. "The Serpents Curse" comes out on December 4th and will hopefully add to the recent rejuvenation of interest in adventure games.