While not an avid Holmes fan, I have played several of Frogware’ Sherlock games in the last seven years and I’m pleased to say they’re getting progressively better. Crimes & Punishments has proven to be the most compelling thus far, but, that’s not to say the series has reached its peak. Indeed, there are still arbitrary puzzles or events that left me feeling clueless and without direction. There are issues with repetition in some of the gameplay mechanics that detract from the experience, too. I found it difficult to play through an entire case in one session, and sometimes the pacing and backtracking felt a little too on rails.
On the other hand, the cases themselves are intriguing. Furthermore, the new deduction system is nice, and only it took a few minutes to get the hang of it. As you gather more information, Sherlock comes up with more possible theories to deduce just what the heck happened. These are represented in a graphical way by neurons and text descriptions. What start as individual observations soon begin to spread out to other observations as you pair the events together. The more of these you have, the tighter the mesh of understanding, and once you have enough information, you can make a deduction and end the case, although you might not be making the completely correct or moral choice. The evidence and observations are such that there seem to be multiple, plausible deductions, and you can complete and close the case having made, ultimately, the wrong decision. There isn’t really any penalty for this, and you can go back to the case, before you committed to your decision, and either re-analyze the details or try to find more information to change your deduction. In these ways, Crimes & Punishments offers a good mental challenge.
Keeping track of all of the info you gather would be a chore without the trusty casebook. You’ll see this interface a lot as it contains everything you know about the current case, as well as info on previous cases like the Character Portraits you have completed. Character Portraits are cool the first few times, but they get kind of tedious after that. Their purpose is understandable — the first time you meet key characters a mini-game starts whereby the game essentially pauses and the camera zooms in on the character. A blurred out list of items is shown, and you have to pan the camera forward or backwards (on rails) and notice certain things (on the list) about this character. Maybe they have a certain type of clothing on, workman’s hands, jewelry, and so forth. Completed Portraits are kept in the Casebook as are all conversation logs. Collected evidence, a to do list, souvenirs, and several more things are found in the nicely organized casebook. I really liked that I could look at the casebook, including the deduction area, during load screens. There is a fair amount of traveling and backtracking in this game, which each load taking anywhere from fifteen to thirty seconds. You can either watch Holmes as he awaits to arrive at the location, or open up the Casebook to review things before getting to the next area.
Some of this backtracking includes going to Scotland Yard or to Baker St, where Holmes and Watson live. From here Holmes can alter his appearance by wearing over a dozen outfits, including different suits, hats, make-up, fake hair, and so on. These disguises are necessary at times to gather more information from NPCs. From the analytics table, Holmes can perform a variety chemistry experiments for yet more clues. His massive collection of books and newspapers act as his archives, from which you’re able to look up historical info and the like.
Gathering evidence in the field makes up the majority of the gameplay. Talking with NPCs is naturally a vital exercise. I found Sherlock’s voice to be kind of grating and almost too ‘perfect.’ If the Robert Downey, Jr. films are to be believed, Holmes is supposed to be somewhat of a snob, and Frogwares does a fine job of getting that point across. Anyway, most conversations with NPCs have somewhat awkward or annoying pauses in which the flow stops until you press X to speak about the next, and only, available question or topic. I realize Frogwares probably did this to give readers a chance to digest what they heard, I guess, but I think the decision was slightly more detrimental than positive.
Analyzing and talking with NPCs goes a long way, but physically locating clues by studying the surroundings is just as important. You can enable Holmes’ innate sense of observation by pressing R1, which colors the world in a speckled gray while highlighting special objects. Additionally, your magnifying cursor will turn blue when hovering over something of interest. I will say that I liked how Crimes & Punishments did not make it difficult to find all of this information, but of course just having it is only half of the equation, you still have to make sense of it which is where the real challenge and intrigue of the game is derived from. I also wanted to mention that, many clues that you discover have to be ‘fully vetted,’ if you will, before they’re useful. This is accomplished through various mini-games, such as using chemistry, taking a measurement, or constructing a 3D puzzle, and so on. Sometimes these events are intuitive; other times I was lost and confused, and that would lead to going in circles for a while. The good news is that you can literally skip these events if you choose to by pressing the touchpad. It’s a tempting option, and something you might abuse if you aren’t disciplined. It might have been good to see Frogwares put a five minute timer on this feature perhaps.
A couple of notes I made on the presentation include delayed or missing lip sync with the dialogue. If I recall, this has been a problem for the series for a long time now; it’s not a deal breaker, but poor lip sync shouldn’t really happen these days. Also, running into repeated dialogue, like when you try to ask Watson something, gets annoying. However, I really liked some of the ambient music, especially this particularly eerie track that often plays while you’re out hunting for clues.
With that, let’s head to the summary…
