BROKEN SWORD II REMASTER TAKES SHAPE

Charles Cecil talks us through Broken Sword: The Smoking Mirror Reforged

- Words by Steve Boxer

Revolution Software has announced that it is working on a remaster of the second Broken Sword game, originally released in 1997. Entitled Broken Sword: The Smoking Mirror Reforged, it will be available on current-gen consoles, the PC, PS4, Xbox One and Switch, and is pencilled in for a spring 2026 release. It will follow 2024's remaster of the original game, Broken Sword: Shadow Of The Templars Reforged.

To find out more, we went straight to the horse's mouth: Revolution Software managing director and Broken Sword originator Charles Cecil. Charles acknowledges that remastering Broken Sword II is the logical move after giving the same treatment to the first game, “It all started with our community saying, 'Why are you not producing these games on the modern consoles?' I've always hung back, but it always struck me that it would be really great to up-rez them.”

With Broken Sword: Shadow Of The Templars Reforged, Cecil thought of turning to AI to handle that up-rezzing process, but that turned out to be a blind alley, “For Broken Sword II, we just decided that rather than messing about, we would redraw all the animations by hand. Bearing in mind that for Broken Sword II there are 45,000 frames of animation, and each one takes an hour, this is a huge undertaking.”