Sherlock Holmes: The Mystery of the Persian Carpet Steam Charts & Stats

Good game for several evenings! Nice music and interesting tasks

I'm a huge fan of Sherlock Holmes and hidden-object Sherlock game-type is nothing new, and I had fun in my other experiences (even the old ones). But this game wasn't all that enjoyable. When you start out with this game, it's fine, but once you progress, the amount of eye strain you have to experience to find objects is not worth it. I've played a number of hidden-object games, where objects are hard to find, but nothing is as comparable as to how bad the developers created the game. I bought this game together with a bundle on sale. Although the whole package was worth the cost, but this game, I would not recommend buying it alone unless it's part of a bundle.

[u]Recommendation[/u]: A simple, linear hidden object game in which you play Sherlock Holmes gathering and analyzing clues. [u]Critique[/u]: This is a really interesting contrast with a more deduction-oriented game like "The Curse of the Golden Idol." Despite it being a game about Sherlock Holmes, there is very little deduction here (really almost none is needed); it's all about detection (which is to say, finding hidden objects). The hidden objects are often EXTREMELY hard to find because they are hidden. Unlike most hidden object games, the objects in this game are almost all out in the open. Rather than have the item you're trying to find lost in a cluttered attic full of random items (as with most hidden object games), nearly every object in this game is sitting in plain view with very little around it, but finding it is difficult because you're not looking in the right place, the resolution is fairly low, and the color of most objects you're trying to find fall somewhere between dark brown and black. Some scenes are very poorly lit, so you are forced to squint at patches of shadow. That sounds really difficult, but it isn't too bad, because the game is very forgiving otherwise. On each screen, you know what you are trying to find: each item has a silhouette AND a descriptive name. For the most part, items are shown in the orientation that they have on the screen, so if there's a knife at a particular diagonal, you know that you are looking for a knife at that same angle in the picture. The mouse cursor changes to indicate when it is over something interactive. The music is a recognizable orchestral piece, but it is very repetitive, as it cycles endlessly during play on every screen. There are "cut scenes" that consist of a static picture with alternating text dialogue from Watson and Holmes. The text advances automatically - you cannot pause it, so you have to read fast (sometimes you have to read fast; the speed that the text advances seems somewhat variable throughout the game, with some text disappearing too fast to read and other text staying on the screen so long you begin to worry that the game has crashed). Like most hidden object games, this game is filled with little mini-games and puzzles to solve to advance the case. What's fun about this one is that no one type of puzzle is ever repeated in this game. Oh, you just did a "knotted rope" puzzle? Well, the next one is a "pipes" puzzle, with a math equation puzzle after that, followed by a cryptogram. There is a HUGE amount of variety here. [u]Review[/u]: For all that I can complain about individual parts of this game, taken as a whole, it was still pretty fun. This game is a pretty impressive implementation of bringing Sherlock Holmes fiction to a video game. Much like reading a Sherlock Holmes story, in this game you are presented with a lot of details, but you don't figure out how they all connect to each other until Holmes explains it all at the end. I was not bothered by this in the slightest; it really does work just like it does in Doyle's fiction.