The popularity of adventure games has waned in recent years, but one thing that the genre has going for it is that when new adventure games do finally hit the market the titles generally have a fairly respectable degree of quality to them. The Broken Sword series is one of the more established lines of adventure titles and just recently has seen its fourth iteration, Secrets of the Ark.

In the new title charismatic hero George Stobbart, after all of his exciting adventures of the past, now finds himself behind a desk at a lowly bail bonds agency trying his hardest to simply keep the bills paid. On one fateful day an attractive blond woman named Anna Marie makes a surprise visit to George's office with two surprises for him; now only does she both know of his experience as an adventurer and is in dire need of his help, at the same time the gangsters that are chasing the poor woman's sudden hostile arrival at his doorstep seals his involvement without even giving him a choice in the matter. It seems that the woman is in possession of a powerful manuscript that is associated with a powerful and ancient weapon of the past, and there are those in the present that want to use that weapon for their own goals.

Gameplay in Secrets of the Ark is largely point-and-click, with the mouse controlling nearly all of the action. The mouse cursor itself is context sensitive and items that can be interacted with or picked up have icons to indicate what the action will be. When the mouse is moved towards the top middle of the screen the inventory bar appears which allows you to select items in your inventory with a left click and then attempt to use them on an object or person in the environment with a second left click. When speaking to a person topics that you can choose to talk about show up with both text and icons in the bottom bar. In essence, Secrets of the Ark has a minimalist interface to the highest degree that at the same time remains intuitive and easy to use.

One of the core gameplay elements in any self-respecting adventure title is the presentation, implementation, and the eventual solution of puzzles. Where other adventure titles can be fairly off the wall, with very few exceptions the majority of the puzzles in Secrets of the Ark are based fairly firmly on logic and make sense. It is often enough to sit back and examine the environment in comparison to what tools you have in your inventory, as well as sprinkle a bit of creative thinking and logic, to come up with a solution to most of the games puzzles. George has a few tools available to him via his handy PDA which are sometimes instrumental in getting past some of the title's puzzles. The PDA keeps track of the game's current plot line via a journal-style story, can be used to call any number that you have found, and can be used to connect to and hack devices that is presented in a puzzle-like style of lasers (data streams) and mirrors.

There is no hint functionality in Secrets of the Ark in the form of a big, shiny button to press, but rather the occasional hint is given rather subtly by Anna Marie or the other characters in the game that you interact with. For instance, if you learn that a character is both in possession of a vital item and is eagerly awaiting a phone call you can take the next logical step of using your PDA to call him to distract his attention away from the object. More often than not though the majority of the puzzles in Secrets of the Ark don't have any form of guidance to solve them, but thankfully for those who tire of scratching their heads on a particular problem can look up hints or the solution outright for free on the game's website.

While the game control is a simple affair of point-and-click it can often be a bit clumsy. Pathfinding in the game often gets hung up on issues of stairs, doorways, or objects such as holes in the floor or things in the way requiring the player to click multiple times to free the character from being stuck and move him a mere few feet away. You can elect to either run or walk to a location, and to run you simply can press Control after you click a location to make George run there instead. The issue is that you rarely have a reason to walk to a location, so something like double-clicking to run or even making run a toggle would have been preferable. The biggest flaw in the control scheme is not a bug but rather an omission; there's simply no way to skip cutscenes or lines of dialog in the game which means that in some of the longer ones if you've seen them before you may as well get up and start dinner; it'll be a while before you can do anything.