Sherlock Holmes: Crimes & Punishment

humanji

Picked this up earlier and it's a surprisingly fun game. I was a fan of the previous Frogware Sherlock Holmes Games, so I'm probably overly biased about this.

They've moved on from the simple adventure game format of the previous ones to having you investigate a series of crimes and deciding yourself who is guilty. It's quite cleverly done. As in normal adventure games, you walk around the scenes, talking to people and looking for clues. There's a few simple puzzles, but it's not overly taxing.

Then as you unlock specific clues, you can try and match them to others to reach a conclusion. These conclusions then can be used to piece together the crime. The fun part is that you get to choose what you think happened instead of just matching up the one story the developers created.

It's kind of cool how it's presented too. You go into Holmes brain and each conclusion is a neuron. Some have a couple of choices ("this proves he must be guilty"/"this only shows that he could have been at the scene" etc) and as you set specific choices, the neurons match up, opening new conlcusions and leading (hopefully) to the culprit.

But you can be wrong. You can send the wrong person to prison if your conclusions are wrong. You can replay cases and come up with different solutions. They also have the Telltale games thing of showing you what percentage of people made the same choices as you, which is disheartening when you realise only 2% sent the same innocent boy to his death (I'm sure he was a bad person, though).

They switched to the Unreal engine for this, so it looks good (not amazing, but it's fine), and the voice acting is pretty good. It's a great culmination in what Frogware have been building on with each game. And it's fantastic that it's actually a series of mysteries instead of one story to follow.

One problem is that it's pretty easy. The only real challenge is piecing together the crimes in Holmes' brain. The few logic puzzles they have can be skipped with no penalty. When you interrogate a person and think they're lying, you're given a chance to present evidence as to how you know. But if you get it wrong, you're just given another chance. And another. Until you get it right.

But, I suppose since you're the greatest detective in the world, you shouldn't be getting these things wrong. And as I said, it really is the piecing together the crime mechanic that is the real meat of the game.

If you liked the previous games, or Sherlock Holmes, or want a good criminal investigation game to get your teeth into, I really recommend this.

calex71

Got it on deal of the week last week for Xbox One, looking forward to it, the previous ones were fairly good.

Odaise Gaelach

I played through the first case there this evening - it's really really good! I though it looked absolutely superb, but then again I was expecting it to look like a typical low-budget point-and-click-adventure game, so the detail and graphics took me quite by surprise. The character animations are excellent too. The characters' postures and little subtle gestures express quite a bit of emotion. It makes it feel very engaging.

Like humanji said, there's not much of a challenge in it, but it all comes together when you're trying to decide who is the killer. I really like how the game gives you the clues and deductions, but no solid facts, and just enough doubt as to who the killer is. You have to really consider the facts and the clues and come to your own conclusion instead of being railroaded into accusing one suspect. It's really quite thrilling.

There is a long enough loading screen when travelling between locations however. But while the game's loading you're able to look at your case journal and make deductions, so the pauses don't break the flow of things too much. If the game didn't let you do that, I don't think I would have enjoyed it nearly as much.

So: it looks great, sounds great, the story is good and it plays grand. I'd definitely recommend it too.

Orizio

Playing through this now but it seems to be glitched or something - basically I'm at the point where Wiggins is supposed to come to Baker Street to give me new information via a cutscene, however this doesn't happen.

Afaik after checking walkthroughs/playthroughs I've done everything necessary up to this point to activate this cutscene.

SeantheMan

Sherlock would be able to figure out what's wrong.