Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments

I got this game entirely based on a recommendation from +Ahmed Jadaa. I had no point of reference, I watch no trailers, I read nothing and thankfully, I was not disappointed. In fact you might say, that I even had a little bit of fun.

Sherlock Holmes: Crime and Punishment is a point and click adventure game with a few quick times events that feel completely out of place scattered here an there through the game. It was developed by Frogwares and published by Focus Home Interactive. I played it on my PC through steam, but the game is available on the PS3, PS4, Xbox 360 and Xbox One as well.

I grew up playing point and click adventure games with games like The Secret of Monkey Island and the Indiana Jones games being foundational games in my gaming life so this game felt quite familiar. However, something felt off for the majority of the time I was playing the game. I didn't actually feel that deduction and actual thinking was required  in any of the cases. I felt the game really held my hand through the entire experience that you would have had to be pretty thick to actually get any of them wrong, or deliberately trying to play Sherlock Holmes as either immoral or an idiot. The easiest example to prove this were the experiments, disguise wardrobe and archive that the game talked up significantly as key parts of the deductive process. The reality was though that not a single one of these aspects of the game were used without the game explicitly telling you to go use them, additionally you were not able to progress the case otherwise. The wardrobe for example was used twice in the entire game with the game very loudly telling you to change your clothes for it, this is aside from the fact that most of the clothes choices were essentially meaningless. It genuinely felt like it was an aspect that the developer worker on and then forgot to figure out a way to actually get it to be of any use in the game itself. The archive and experiments also seemed like a waste of time, you were not doing any actual deductive work, you were just conducting the boring actions, it was like a filler episode in a show used to simply take up time. It felt on numerous occasions that I could have seen the "experiment" being done in a cut scene of something instead of wasting my time following the explicit orders of the game to two a drop here and a drop there. I felt like I was a government clerk as opposed to the worlds greatest detective and his doctor friend. The thing that got me the most though was that you were not allowed to make mistakes in the game, questioning suspects always had a single and very specific outcome. This bothered me since LA Noire a detective game that came out in 2011 had branching cases where the player could not only make mistakes during the investigation but also imprison the wrong person regarding the case and the would move forward for a game to come out four years later and not have this aspect as well was more than a little disappointing.

The strongest aspects of the game for me were the characters and the overall story of each of the individual cases. The compartmentalization of the cases really paced the game well for me since I could stop and come back to the game without feeling lost and it gave each case the space it needed to feel like its own adventure. However, even in the part of the game I enjoyed the most there were flaws. The biggest of these flaws was how the story and gameplay itself didn't work that well together, on a number of cases I would find an item that would be needed later on in the case but I would not be allowed to pick it up until a specific event happened in the story, at which point Holmes would wonder very loudly to himself about the item he needed. This essentially had me pointlessly traveling around the game doing errands. This is also strange since within the genre of point and click adventure games characters can pick up usable items at any time and may not find a use for them until much later in the game as opposed to being forced to have to wait to be told to pick it up. I found it a little infuriating that these items would also be marked with a  huge questions mark mocking me until I fast traveled somewhere else to watch a  cut scene just to fast travel back and be able to pick up the item. The moral choices in the game also have no significance for the player themselves, coming down hard on a criminal or letting them off easy had no impact of the game itself, you would simply get a single letter in the next chase and never see or hear from anyone involved again. Morality systems don't matter if there is no impact on the game's world or the player themselves and all my decisions felt hollow regardless of which way I went at the end of a case.

At least I got to poke around some butt holes.

 Nothing in this game really excels, I wouldn't say that it was a bad experience, I had fun and enjoyed experiencing the game. But the flaws in the game are very noticeable, clunky controls, very linear and easily solvable cases, pointless filler action to make you feel like you are doing something when the game is just holding your hand through the experience. I don't feel mad though, I think that the developer is just caught in this awkward phase in gaming where certain aspects are expected of a game like detailed background environments, realistic character models, three dimensional environments that really felt superficial in this game. I'm sure this took a substantial amount of effort from the development team to make, but I feel it caused them to lose focus on the core aspects of the game like having truly branching case conclusions, clues as well as false leads and impactful endings to the cases themselves.