Game Review - Crimes and Punishments Sherlock Holmes

Game Review: Crimes and Punishments: Sherlock Holmes by Frogwares
Score: +9/-3
++Crimes and Punishments plays out quite closely to a TV episode of Sherlock Holmes, and that is probably its greatest strength as a game and gameplay experience. Overall ambiance, characterization, and facial animation are good.
-The constant head-bob simulation when you move gradually contributes to motion sickness. And Watson has a talent for getting in the way when you turn around and change direction.

++The mysteries are interesting! They are mysterious and draw you in right away with how curious they are. Don't let the first case throw you off as to the "theme" of the mysteries -- it escalates very quickly into very inventive circumstances. For example, the second mystery involves a train that disappears. "How does a train disappear?" -- Exactly.

+An investigation takes you through not just Sherlock Holmes's core competency of astonishing deductions, but his other traits such as science, research, boxing, disguise and more. This really lets you immerse in the role of Sherlock Holmes more fully.
+You can get stuck on some of the puzzle or action mini-games which have nothing to do with deduction, but fortunately you can also skip them, thus allowing you to focus on the core gameplay and Sherlock Holmes experience. Because some of the minigames are really hard, like the rope-bridge crossing in the third investigation. All types of gameplay are tested and fortunately they do not gate progress. Only the core gameplay of deduction and mystery solving is mandatory.
-+Its not hard to find all the clues, and when you find enough clues you are locked out of certain potential wrong outcomes. Which is theoretically good, but you can also feel railroaded into not failing.
That said, here are different deduction outcomes as well as differences in how some of the scenes play out, so it offers quite a bit of replayability. But it can feel odd when your deductions were flawed and the case was still "solved" with an incorrect accusation.
-+Some evidence gathered is written down or interpreted and does not form part of the chain of deductions in the "Deduction Space" that result in an accusation. This is an interesting omission which makes it tricky to rely too much on the notebook as Holmes' thought-space as well as our tally of clues, so you must still pay attention to the information you gather during the investigation and make your own notes to make the correct interpretations.
Even more complicated is the fact that we cannot even take everything at face value even if Holmes says it or it is written as "fact" in your casebook. While this can make a case more "mysterious", it also goes against the concept of the notebook being Sherlock Holmes' thought-space and that conflicts with our reliance on it.
For example, in the Kew Gardens case, Holmes does not fully analyze a lengthy recording, but instead short-cuts it and pronounces a conclusion, which the player may very well take as fact. When it become questionable, there is no option to revisit the recording and further analyze it. Since this is a game and the range of actions is necessarily limited, there are many possibilities here:

• Holmes could have revisited the evidence and found it still valid.
• Holmes second-guessed it and just didn't present any feedback to change previous information about it.
• Holmes forgot about it.
• The developers forgot about it.
• The developers intentionally left it as a false lead. Which is a risky move to make in a murder mystery because in a good murder mystery, both the reader and the detective must have the same opportunity to arrive at the solution. If the detective has more information, the reader feels cheated; if the reader has more then it's no longer about the mystery and is more likely a drama.

+The "moral choice" component to how each case ends is also an interesting choice interaction that makes the player thoughtful about justice and in some ways allows the player to take into account what they feel to be mitigating circumstances. It certainly impresses on the player a sense of "choices matter", which is a difficult trick games that try to incorporate don't do very well. And when games with long stories don't do it at all, they tend to feel meaningless.