Brendan Fraser And Marion Cotillard Were Charles Cecil’s Dream Picks For A Broken Sword Movie

Broken Sword 2 Reforged Has No AI, With "Everything Hand-Drawn From Scratch" Published Sep 3, 2026, 9:00 AM EDT Meg is an Executive Editor and Technical Lead for TheGamer, and has been working within the gaming industry since 2014. She was shortlisted as a finalist for the GameHers Journalist of the Year award in 2022 and was a juror for the BAFTA Games Awards 2026. Some of the games and genres that Meg is an expert in include RPGs, point-and-clicks, puzzle games, and life sims. She has a particular fondness for Yakuza/Like a Dragon and Final Fantasy, especially Final Fantasy 14 (for which she used to run a weekly community column). Broken Sword is one of my all-time favourite game series. I have so much nostalgia for this beloved point-and-click series, and I can remember the first time I played it all those years ago on PlayStation. I have so many memories with family and friends of problem-solving and bragging over the years as new titles launched, so when the first game, Shadow of the Templars, was given the Reforged treatment, I was absolutely ecstatic. Last week at Gamescom, I caught up with Revolution Software founder and Broken Sword creator Charles Cecil, who has had to put up with me nagging about Broken Sword 2: The Smoking Mirror ever since the first Reforged was announced, as the second title is my favourite of the whole lot. Fortunately, I didn’t have to wait long for a Reforged version of The Smoking Mirror to be announced, and now I’m excitedly awaiting its launch. The Smoking Mirror: Reforged Is Much More Than A Visual Upgrade “The Kickstarter was fantastic,” Cecil says about Shadow of the Templars: Reforged. “It showed that there was enthusiasm, which was great. Generally, I think the feeling is we did deliver, in terms of the awards and also the game, because we spent every penny and considerably more, but it gave us so much confidence.” Much like revisiting the first title, Cecil says it's “a privilege for me to go back”, and with the 30th anniversary of Broken Sword at the end of this month, it feels particularly fitting to see the series going from strength to strength right now. One of the things that the team wanted to address with The Smoking Mirror: Reforged was consistency. The knife that the priest holds in the opening cutscene is meant to be the same knife that Nico finds later in the game, but the two looked nothing alike. The iconic mask also didn’t match, and so the team were able to address these issues in Reforged. Cecil shows me gameplay of The Smoking Mirror: Reforged, showcasing the level of detail added in the animations by switching between the old graphics to see George staring dead ahead while strapped to a chair, to the new graphics that show him nervously eyeing the tarantula on the floor in front of him. “There is the requirement to add a lot of animation. For Broken Sword 1, we couldn't recompile the scripts. In Broken Sword 2, we could.” Broken Sword 1 had 30,000 frames, but The Smoking Mirror boasts 55,000 frames of animation. While the team used AI to upscale some scenes for the first Reforged, for the sequel “everything is hand-drawn from scratch, so there’s no use of AI”. This meant that it was an incredible amount of work for the team to redraw huge numbers of frames. Cecil also showed me how the clouds in the sky now move, the real-time lighting, and how the eclipse in the background actually grows over time. “We've added so many parallax screens because we're completely enthused by the level of passion and the enthusiasm that the fans have. You might not even notice it, but what you want, in art, in my view, is you don't want to notice. You just need to know that there's a sense of movement that's happening.” The Reforged sequel also includes mouse controls for the Nintendo Switch 2, and another improvement is that the much-loved ability to switch between the original and Reforged graphics now also includes the old system when you pick up and use items or speak with other characters. “We're just responding to what people say they love and what they don't like,” Cecil tells me. Charles Cecil Wants To Make Broken Sword 3 Reforged, But It Would Be A Huge Undertaking With The Smoking Mirror: Reforged having the finishing touches applied to it, it’s only natural to look to the future and what might come next. “As a thought experiment, we did an up-res of 3, and do you know what? It looked like a low-res version, a low-res game up-res'd,” Cecil says. “The way that we would need to do Broken Sword 3, undoubtedly, in my mind, is to hand-draw all the backgrounds. Now whether we go down the 3D route or not would be yet to be decided, but we would need to do all the backgrounds. So it is a big job, but then again, if we're stuck with 3D, which would be much more elegant now and make it look much more like 2D, then it is something I'd love to do.” Revolution Software is also still hard at work developing the next entry in the series, Broken Sword - Parzival's Stone, a “full-blown point and click” that Cecil says is “super ambitious” and so the team is building the revenues up to do it full justice. “I love what we did with Broken Sword 1: we got three-quarters of the way through and then, because Virgin were funding us, I was able to sit back and look and say what works well, let's think back, let's address everything, and I can do the same now with Parzival's Stone. In particular, there was gameplay where you can go back in time once you knew enough information, and you can see something that happened a hundred years ago or whenever is relevant to now, and I felt that actually has so much potential.” Cecil tells me he was “very taken” by Life is Strange’s ability to go back in time, though he clarifies he’s talking about a “completely different method” for Broken Sword. “It just makes it very dynamic, and it transcends in many ways a more flat narrative structure because you’re jumping around in time. That is something that I did a bit with the benefit of not having the pressure of having to release it now. I can go back over and hopefully make the game that much better because I love the history, I love the story that we've got. It would make life so easy, rather than starting from scratch, to go in where the story has been written; it works well, a lot of the puzzles have been designed, but I would like to go back and make sure they're alright.” Cecil tells me that the team is also “working on exciting new projects” in addition to developing Parzival's Stone and bringing the older titles into 4K, and tells me that Revolution Software is “very excited to be writing a new game”. Though he remained tight-lipped about the details, just knowing that something fresh is on the horizon is exciting. And it’s not just about the games; Revolution Software also has a movie adaptation in the pipeline, so overall, it’s an incredible time for the team. “The film is super exciting. I think we have to be quite clear on the film, and that is that there are some very senior people who are really excited and are pitching in to the studios. So, you know, let's not count our chickens quite yet. I've just come back from China, and that was really exciting. You know, they love Western animation; we're very pleased. They love puzzle games, so there's just loads of things that might happen and will happen over time. It's just a very exciting time to be; for the first time, we're not financially back to the wall. You know, we're not rich, but we're not struggling, and it's just so refreshing, and it's been the first time in absolutely years that we've been in that position.” When discussing the film, I asked Cecil what his dream casting would be, but his top picks are now too old. “Marion Cotillard would have been my dream 20 years ago”, he says about Nico, while for George he says that Brendan Fraser “would have been the obvious one because he had the sense of humour. He and Marion Cotillard would have been a great combination because of the chemistry. Because he's a buffoon and she's no-nonsense. Every French woman who has her wits about her would find him intensely irritating and would take none of his nonsense. And then they would become friends and, maybe even lovers.” I can absolutely imagine it. Fraser has exactly the right charm and humour for George (and even had the right hair in The Mummy), while Cotillard could absolutely pull off Nico having no patience whatsoever for his nonsense. Sadly, Cecil is probably right that the ship has sailed on that particular dream casting, but now that a Broken Sword movie is genuinely being pitched, I’m very curious to see who eventually gets to become George and Nico. Developer(s) Revolution Software Publisher(s) Revolution Software Prequel(s) Broken Sword - Shadow of the Templars: Reforged Number of Players Single-player Steam Deck Compatibility Unknown Genre(s) Adventure, Exploration, Mystery, Point-and-click