This game is basically garbage. Sherlock and Watson are terrifically dull, every attempt at humor or deeper characterization falls flat on its face, and the puzzle controls are consistently bad enough that the developers let you skip any puzzle without consequence because a couple of them are straight up impossible to figure out purely based on the poor controls. It does some sort of interesting stuff when it comes to concluding the cases, but by the time that happens you’re just wishing it would be over (and then it throws you a half-baked quick time event after your decision that can ruin any sense of satisfaction if you fail it). This shit stinks!

You play Sherlock Holmes. The detective.
I love crime stories. I love detective work. I should love this game.
The idea of running around deducing conclusions based on evidence is a great concept. Many people love the idea. Sherlock Holmes is also beloved.
There have been made several of these Sherlock Holmes games, but I will keep to reviewing this game as a stand alone and do no comparisons.
You go through 6 separate cases and have to solve whatever crime has been committed.
I liked 2 of the stories most. It was the roman steam bath and then the flower garden. The other ones were not quite as good.

I played the game with controller and never tried the mouse/keyboard combo. The controller mechanics were fine.
The game shifts between finding clues to deducing to solving puzzles. This never gets boring as they are spread out evenly throughout the game.

I love the concept and mechanics of the deducing part, but it not often used well. You very quickly get the idea that most deductions are 2 fold. So if you only have 1 deduction, wait a little, find more clue and then you suddenly have a choice. Most often these choices are extremely straight forward. The game also helps you out way too much.

Why does the deduction overview paint some choices red? Well because they clash with 1 or more other deductions you have made. Why tell me? Why not just leave it up to me to figure out? You are holding my hand and making me feel like playing with a handicap.

Why when I try and match clues are you telling me "Wrong". This is making it way too easy. Just try them all, one by one, and if some of them match, ding-ding-ding.

I also love adventuring crime scenes. I love walking around and finding clues. Looking at dead bodies and plotting routes in and out.
But why are you constantly prompting me "HERE... OVER HERE". The entire game feels like being played with a tutorial activated.
"Now press RB to activate focus mode", because there is now something you should focus on. Come on. "Now press LB" because Sherlock has an image in his head of how this might have been done.

You can examine objects. ALL objects you examine are important. All. And when you find an object you do not need, then it tells you that this object is of interest.... Because later in the game you need it.
It is insanely frustrating to have the game shoving the only fun thing of the game down your throat.
When do I, the player, get to do actual detective work? Sherlock is giving off all the clues. All I need to do is push the buttons when prompted and watch load scenes and cutscenes.
This might as well have been a QTE game. Which I am sure it is not. WHAM... MOVE STICK HERE AND PRESS.... TOO LATE... She died. WHAT? A QTE in the middle of everything. Come on. 2 Quick Time Events put in the game, and I apparently had to be ready for them. Whatever.

And mentioning load scenes. This reminds me. Optimize please. It was actually very smart to have the deduction and inventory part available during loading scenes, and the loading was not awfully long, but they are so frequent, that they annoyed we after the first 2 cases. I do not have that much deduction work that I need to spend that much time in there.

I also get to interrogate witnesses and suspects. AWESOME. Well.... Not really. You get to ask them stuff that you have clues about. This gives you more clues. And once in a while you have suspects that are telling you a lie, but the game tells you with a QTE that this is a lie. PRESS X... NOW. Okay I press X, but why do I need to? We already now they are not telling the truth as you do not prompt me unless they are. And then I get to answer with one of 5 clues, and only one of them is the write answer for the lie. But it is extremely easy choice unless you skip through all dialogue and do not at least try and play the game (which I am fairly certain you could do, and still complete it).

The only story that had me wandering around looking for clues a lot was the train station story. As the scene were big and there were quite a few, I was wandering around looking for "Examine Me"-popups too much. Well I knew I needed more clues because the game would tell me when I had done enough by giving me a cutscene, so I kept combing the scenes until I got it.

As long as you can't deduce a perpetrator because the game said you had too little evidence, then you need more evidence. This forces the player to just find all the clues. And as they are easy to find, if you miss some it is because you got bored when you finally could point to a perpetrator, that you just pointed to him to make the story end.

This game could have been awesome, and this type of game is right up my alley. But the implementation was dreadful. I am glad that there were only 6 cases

For more than two decades now, Frogwares have slaved away in the point and click mines, an unsung hero of an oft-flailing genre. Their main export, the Sherlock Holmes games, are certainly no high art, but the early entries are exemplary of early 00s PC euro-jank. The origins of the series might be little more than a cheap knockoff of games like the 7th Guest with a thin Holmes veneer, but almost immediately they evolved to become truly ambitious detective games. Sure, the next five entries are still essentially linear point and click adventures where the mystery solving is relegated to reading comprehension tests, but the spirit is there.

The Testament of Sherlock Holmes felt like a capper to this era, containing all the familiar and beloved (?) elements of the prior Frogwares SH games. A swansong of sorts, with a story that is unbelievably silly, even in a series that features Eldritch entities and Jack the Ripper himself. Even within that game though, there is still ambition, a desire to evolve and innovate. Where Testament largely falls flat on that front, Crimes & Punishments achieves a (near) total victory. This is the the Sherlock Holmes game, for better and for worse.

Almost all of the mechanics you come to expect have been thrown out here, replaced with a brand new suite of detecting tools. None of them are truly original, but almost all of them feel distinctly Holmes-flavoured (the ability to visually analyse people you meet and deduce facts about them is a particularly well implemented example). Where before there were a handful of minigame-esque puzzles, here you can't move for them. Lockpicking, body-analysis, crime scene visualisation, contradictions in conversations, scientific evidence analysis, forking paths of deduction, there are so many ways you'll be investigating that it's rare the game feels repetitive at all. The major downside of this variety is that none of these elements feel particularly fleshed out and often you'll solve puzzles almost entirely accidentally.

This game is far and away the most visually impressive Sherlock game yet, being leagues ahead of Testament just two years prior. It does have that slightly off putting UE3 vibe at times, but it makes better use of the engine than most games did. There's still a fair amount of asset recycling from previous games (keep an eye out for that one homeless old guy with the weird hat from all the way back in Nemesis), but they've been brought up to par with the newer visuals generally. Voice acting is great too, though I do somewhat miss the charmingly shite performances of earlier games.

By far the biggest change is the structure of the game. Rather than following one big case across different chapters, here Sherls and John tackle six separate crimes. There's a vague narrative thread between the first and last, but it's so in the background that I'd completely forgotten about it by the time it showed up again at the very end. This is a great change, giving the game a feel closer to the short story compilations rather than the novel sized stories previous games were going for. Sherlock's inductive reasoning and spagetti mysteries often work best in the microcosmic, and this goes doubly for the games too. In previous entries, it was often easy to forget why you were doing what you were doing. Playing out a complicated, confusing mystery over six to eight hours often meant that the climax made no sense at all by the time you got to it. C&P is now comprised of cases that are about as long as an episode of Midsomer Murders and it's a welcome change.

Even better than this though is the new way conclusions are formed. Rather than finding out the one singularly correct solution, each case now has multiple, conflicting endings and you have to choose which one you think is correct. It's a little too easy to check your working and the game in general is pretty easy, but it's a fantastic idea that I'd love to see more often. Hilariously, you can choose to absolve or condemn your prime suspect, which can result in the fantastic scenario wherein Sherlock accuses an innocent bystander then tells them he's going to let them go anyway. The moral judgements aren't very interesting in the intended way, but I'm glad of their inclusion just for this peak piece of gaming comedy.

So finally, with their seventh attempt, Frogwares made a truly great Sherlock Holmes game. It is far, far from perfect, and is realistically the perfect example of a great 7/10 game, but in my heart I just respect what they've achieved here to score them any lower. It's too easy, the cases are a little too short and the loading screens are annoying, but god it's a charming, ambitious, scrappy little game and I love it.

This game was a delight to play. Intriguing Mysteries to solve, Good enough visuals, Decent Music to fit the environments, Great voice acting for the most part, and a very unique gameplay feel.
This is the definitive Sherlock experience in my eyes, with just enough freedom to shape the story yourself in both gameplay and story.

I have my complaints like the puzzles being a bit simpler, the sort of casual hand holding the game does, and the absolute annoying minigames that randomly pop up however I think the puzzles and hand holding works in its favour in this case.
The simplicity of it offers a new audience of people who are afraid to explore the genre of puzzle games a great starting point and hopefully lead to them trying more complex games in the future. It also allows fans of Sherlock Homes the ability to experience the IP a lot easier.
I did notice that when playing on PlayStation 5 some shadows tended to freak out a lot, when switching to my PS4 the shadows did not have that issue

Forgot I played this game a long while ago. I got all the achievements too! Not sure why really, but it's a solid mystery/detective game. There's no combat or real action in this game, and is mainly just Sherlock going around and putting evidence together to solve a given case. You can then put together your solution of the case in Sherlock's head. The game doesn't actually tell you if your solution is right or not despite getting an ending finale cutscene for each case once you enter your solution. But you can reveal what the true answer is after watching said cutscene. May take a few playthroughs if you''re achievement hunting since some of them are missable (if you're not spoiling yourself in advance of the correct outcomes).

It was obvious this game was made on a budget as you play it, but they still worked with what they had to make a solid Sherlock Holmes game. If you need to scratch your detective/mystery itch, it might be worth a pickup for cheap.

Score: 81

Juego de investigación donde muchas veces no te dejan investigar pues te cortan todo el rato con cualquier tontería (pero las mecánicas de averiguar que ha ocurrido están bien, eso si). Los personajes están bastante tiesos, como si todos tuviesen una armadura puesta. Hay bug gráfico que hace que las texturas parpadeen por todo el juego con bastante frecuencia, hasta el punto de llegar a ser molesto.
Otro bug es que cuándo tomas el control tras leer algo a veces no avanza para adelante, debes dejar de presionar y volver a hacerlo para que camine. Si te atrancas te permite saltarte cualquier puzzle que desees, cosa que probablemente ocurra, pues te deja equivocarte en tus deducciones. Como apunte final, el perro tiene una cara rara, a medio hacer.