Broken Sword 5: The Serpent's Curse is a classical point & click adventure. It abandons 3D graphics and direct control which were used in the two predecessors and returns to the style of the first two games. The only major technical differences are a higher resolution and that the characters are modelled instead of drawn. Like every Broken Sword game the plot is inspired by historical events: everything centers around the painting La Maledicció. George Stobbart and Nicole Collard witness as a masked man steals La Maledicció and kills the gallery owner. Both have their motivations to solve the crime - George works for the painting's insurer, Nico is a reporter and the police are incompetent - and so they unravel a conspiracy which is somehow connected to the Gnostic Gospels.

The game uses an intelligent mouse cursor: a right click on a hotspot results in looking at the item and a left click triggers an item-specific action. Of course this is the main ingredient of the puzzles: collecting items and using them on other items in order to solve problems. On some occasions there are also logic puzzles from a zoomed-in view on an object, e.g. connecting cables of an engine in order to repair the car's horn. Another important part of the game are conversations with the various characters, some of them known from previous instalments. During the course of the game the controlled character switches between George and Nico. A help function supports players who are stuck.

The original release only included the first half of the game and the second half was patched in later. The first half is set in Paris with two trips to London. The Vita version was released as a bundle (listed here) and also with the first episode separately (listed along the Android/iOS version).