Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened (2008) Reviews

A fun adventure game. Lots of interesting and fairly challenging puzzles. Game obviously involves Sherlock Holmes, but the twist is that it features Lovecraft mythology. The two settings do fit quite well together. Though Holmes and Watson are a fair bit more sarcastic and witty compared to the average Lovecraft main character, I think they still manage to fit well into the setting, or lovecraft fits well into Sherlock's setting. Ultimately it was a fun story to take part in, and the game provided lots of little bits of background info you will read about and that all does a good job of building atmosphere. The puzzles as I mentioned are fun and engaging. Some are a considerable challenge too. If you can manage to solve every single one without the use of the hint system, you are big brained. Those who are not the biggest brainiacs, like myself, there is a pretty good hint system. Per puzzle, or activity you have to complete, the game provides a number of hints. Each time you click the hint button, you receive a clue, and every subsequent click, the clue becomes much more specific. So you can use as many or as few to figure out how to complete whatever it is you need to solve. You can navigate in first person or "third person mode". The third person mode is a more typical point and click view. I mostly used first person mode, as to me it was the most comfortable way to go through the levels. Either way, it was nice to have the option, as I would on occasion switch up the view. I found the third person view would help when trying to locate a specific object or location to interact with. It will angle the camera to a set area, rather than the 100% free range of motion the first person view provides. The game ran fine for the most part despite the reviews. Using Proton it booted up first go and I had no issues running it, benefits of not using winblows I suppose. I did run into one rather annoying glitch. Essentially softlocked me.. Despite the game telling me I needed to go to a specific location, any time I would attempt to travel there, Holmes would run through a bit of dialogue saying how important it was for us to travel to that location, then nothing would happen. Saw a few other people in the discussions with a similar issue, and the workaround was to download a save file at the place I needed to travel to. This solved my issue (if this happens to you too, make sure the save file is for the Remastered version of Awakened 2008, otherwise the save seems to be incompatible.). Though I am still not sure if this happened because I missed one specific object on the map or not. Oh well, I will only find out if I replay this game in the future. Anyway, good game, do buy. Also, remember to SAVE, there are fail-states.