Playtime:
124 minutes
A very fascinating game with an interesting user interface. Compared to the more "gamey" Sherlock Holmes games, this one is more about you as the player thinking about the facts, instead of relying on the game telling you what to do and what it means.
The gameplay consists of you poring through newspapers, and lists of people and locations, the main idea being that YOU have utter freedom on how to proceed, which place to go, whom to interrogate, with the game providing no "path" for you to follow, except for the clues that you've gathered so far. Really good concept.
There are some problems with it, though, mainly that the only "penalty" for going to an "empty" place(only some are connected to the case and thus have full motion video that gives you more clues) is that you gain a number of "time points" that measure how effectively you've solved the case. These have no bearing on the game as such. Thus, you'll have to impose restrictions to yourself so as to only go to logical places you've deduced, instead of just going through everything one at a time in order for it to make more sense. Once you've solved the case, your results are compared to a "perfect sherlock" score as to see how well you did in comparison with the great detective. That's really the only reason to refrain from doing everything mindlessly, your own pride.
The other sort of problematic thing is that the game records clues fairly randomly. There's an in-game notebook that has some things written on it based on what you've seen on the FMVs when you visit places. The problem is that most of the critical information is still in the FMV itself, so you'll often have to rewatch the whole FMV(no rewinding) to remind yourself of a particular clue. This can be annoying since the FMVs can be a few minutes long, which means pointless waiting since there's no skipping the video to a particular timestamp, at least that I found. For example, visting the crimescene triggers an FMV where Holmes and Watson talk to a person before studying the crimescene, and thus I'm forced to watch the talking part every time I want to inspect the crimescene, which can be bothersome. Skipping around the video would be hugely useful and make everything far less tedious, without really compromising anything of the enjoyability of the game.
There are some problems that arise from the game seemingly being a port from an iPad or such, I think? There are no scrollbars for example, so you'll have to use the mousewheel to scroll through the notebook, which can be tedious.
Overall the case is quite logical, but quite short as well. Took me 2 hours to solve, I think, based on my playing time. There's one big problem in the case for me, which I can't really say due to spoilers, but the fact that it isn't addressed annoys me greatly, since there wasn't an explanation on why it's ignored, and in my opinion it impacts the deductions on the case quite a lot.
There's also a few strange typos, or things being referred with another name in one place than the next, despite it clearly being the same thing in question, which lead to some confusion on my part.
The overacted FMV clips add a certain charm to it, which may be very annoying to some people, since it's verily not-serious, with overblown sound effects when new clues are told to Sherlock or Watson, and so on.
In the end, I believe it was easily worth the money I paid, since even though I might've been only a few hours long, the price is equally low, so it balances out. I'd love to see more games in this style, since it's utterly fascinating. That the game allows me to solve the case by going through my own deductive path, without giving any hints or treating me like a dimwit is very refreshing and frankly works surprisingly well on the computer, despite not using anything even remotely close to modern graphics or gameplay. The game as it is, could've easily been made in the early 90s(maybe it was, I know little of the history of the game, whether it's actually new, old, or whatever), but that doesn't mean that it's bad, just that the design of the game is very, very different from what you'd expect from a modern game, especially if you compare it to any of the other Sherlock style games.
👍 : 73 |
😃 : 2