Title: Sherlock Holmes – Crimes & Punishments
Developer: Frogwares
Publisher: Focus Home Interactive
Genre: Adventure
Platform(s): PC (reviewed), PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One
Price: PC ($39.99), PS3 (₹2799), PS4(₹3499) [PS3 and PS4 versions are being distributed in India by Origin Marketing. Other versions may need to be imported or bought digitally]
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The detective from Baker Street, London has aged well with the times. Whether the same can be said for his countless adaptations, be it movies, television or video games, is yet to be seen. There have been good modern adaptations, like the Steven Moffat TV series Sherlock. There have been bad ones, like the movie that starred Robert Downey Jr., a movie in which I dozed off at the theater, not physically but mentally.
In the midst of awful, average and good adaptations, we are now presented with a classic Victorian Sherlock Holmes in the game Sherlock Holmes – Crimes & Punishments. My first encounter with the game was at E3 2014, when the devs took me through the steam bath murder mystery. At that time, things looked good. This was looking to be a promising game. I got to analyse blood samples, speak to three suspects, there was an alluring call.
Now that the game has released in full, my opinion has changed invariably. Do I hate it? No. Do I like it. No. But I still played it, it did keep me coming back, but only for a while.
Good day to you, Mr. Holmes
Sherlock Holmes – Crimes & Punishments features six cases set in a Victorian English backdrop. This game has all the features to boast of like character portrait examinations, moral choices, deducible outcomes which vary according to the choices you make and Unreal engine powered graphics for the eye candy. Even when it comes to sheer quantity of content, Sherlock Holmes – Crimes & Punishments has a lot to offer.
Holmes is obviously aided by Dr. Watson, and the game would have been better if he had a more active part in it. Watson is pure filler material in this game, the game wouldn’t have been any different if Watson was omitted altogether. That is the level of redundancy of this character. Sure, he will be used during a ‘shooting’ experiment, he completes most of Holmes’ sentences, but there is no real addition Watson brings to the game, apart from staying true to the Sir Arthur Canon Doyle character structure.
Each case starts off on a high note, a mysterious disappearing train or a murder in a steam bath. They set the backdrop of legitimate mystery, one that you would probably care to solve. Once you get to solving them though, it’s just a loading screen parade with no ‘actual’ case solving. As in, you don’t actually use your intelligence to solve cases. You just go through a narrative experience, analyse this, examine that closely, speak to this character, deduce a conclusion. It’s pretty much a drag actually.
There are times when Sherlock has to collect objects and perform experiments on them. Like a parchment of paper with smudged handwriting. Holmes has to add reagents in a specific order to reveal the handwriting. Another terribly painful boring exercise. In this one case Sherlock has to arm wrestle a person: a QTE fest doing no good to your IQ whatsoever.
It gets worse when you have to keep visiting the same set of locations over and over again, going through all those painful loading screens to just speak to that same person again, in the wild hope that they will reveal some new dialogue. And if you’re stuck, you have to visit all the locations and speak to every character and analyse every interesting object once again just to see what outcome they lead to.
Things are not all that bad though, you can come to a conclusion if you have enough information to reach one. At times I figured out the mystery before hand, but I still had to go through 45 minutes of scripted narrative gameplay to reach to the outcome ‘officially’. If you’re not confident about your conclusion, you can investigate further. You might even end up convicting the wrong person. But then again, all the six cases are largely unconnected to each other, so the implications of you conclusion are majorly redundant. Once you solve a case, the game shows you what outcome other players are coming to.
Sure, the game looks gorgeous in every aspect. The Unreal engine shows off some of the most beautiful Victorian England backdrops, but the optimization is bad. I was running the game on a beefy GTX 770 SLI setup and the game frequently stuttered.
Sherlock Holmes: Crimes & Punishments initially shows a lot of promise but drags on as you progress. If you’re looking for a game where you solve cases using investigation, experimentation and intelligence, look elsewhere. However, if you’re looking for a decent detective narrative experience, Sherlock Holmes: Crimes & Punishments won’t disappoint you.
