Broken Sword: The Serpent's Curse hits Kickstarter from Revolution Software

Broken Sword: The Serpent's Curse, the fifth entry in Revolution Software's long-running Broken Sword series of adventure games, is now available for fans to fund on Kickstarter.

Broken Sword creator Charles Cecil says, "We've got many of the original team members back again," and they're building The Serpent's Curse as an "unashamedly 2D" point-and-click adventure game. Also returning are series protagonists George Stobbart and Nicole "Nico" Collard, who were running around Paris busting open Knights Templar conspiracies a half-decade before The Da Vinci Code made it cool. Nico and George will be animated in 3D and then pre-rendered as 2D frames in the game world.

The Kickstarter video includes the opening of the game: a gunman bursts into a gallery, stealing an unassuming painting and shooting an innocent bystander.

The Serpent's Curse has been in development at Revolution for the past six months, according to Cecil, and now the studio is asking for help from fans to the tune of $400,000. George's original voice actor, Rolf Saxon, is already on board; Revolution also says it will fully localize the game into French and German, with plans for Spanish and Italian as well.

Revolution is aiming to launch Broken Sword: The Serpent's Curse in the first quarter of 2013. Versions on PC, Mac, iOS, Android, and Linux are already confirmed, and the team hopes that it can port the game to consoles as well.