Normally I don't like leaving a game unfinished but in this instance, where I was trying my utmost to discover everything by myself, without a walkthrough and without using the in-game hints, I feel cheated.

The game has a sound premise, I'll give it that. I come into this game having already played (and loved) one other Sherlock title, so perhaps my expectations were high, but here I was thinking, 'This can't possibly go wrong.'

Gosh was I ever wrong.

Starting the game, you are given a few screens of text to read, indicating the importance of finding everything and taking your time to search thoroughly so you can succeed, but in all honesty, I feel these paragraphs totally laughable. You have to find everything to proceed anyway - you can't 'miss' something and still try to progress, so the whole idea of a possible Failure Ending is already rubbish. If you can't find everything, you can't proceed.

So already the game has a shaky foundation for true detective work.

Before you even get control over the gameplay, you are stuck staring from a camera panning down empty 19th Century London streets in what is supposed to be an intro to Sherlock's residence, but I couldn't watch it. The graphics are so shoddy, so appalling and abysmal, that I felt a raging battle within every fibre of my being not to gouge out my eyes and jump up and down on my monitor. The streets were EMPTY. Not only is this a pure fiction already, but it was SUNNY. Not a single shadow anywhere to be seen. I thought it was supposed to be London, not the OK Corral after a bloody shootout. If that was the intent they should have put in some tumbleweeds.

So, strike two. Not even playing the game at this point and to be honest, not looking forward to it in the slightest.
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I should say here, before getting to strike three, that I tried to like the game. I managed to get through the first act, where the first theft takes place. I thought I did pretty well considering the limitations apparent in the game.

The limitations stem from the graphics. More the lack of interesting things to pass your cursor over. If there's nothing interesting to look at, then there's nothing to click on, and thus the overall complexity of the game is reduced. So when you do see something out of the ordinary, it's too OBVIOUSLY something you need to investigate.

This comes back to the paragraphs of warnings at the start of the game. Just, why? Why say anything about being observant at all, when you haven't put anything into the game to diversify the scenery? Ergo, there is a lot of running around and tabbing to the map menu so you can teleport, because the game is plodding. Investigations are so obvious it is a wonder Watson isn't the main character and Sherlock is on holiday in Bermuda or whatever.
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But here's the straw that broke my anger reserves. In the next act, I was following a clue about MacAdams to get a clue to a combination lock, but even hovering the magnifying glass over the SPOILER location, it would appear the art is ambiguous. It could be a 3 or a 5. There's just not enough of a difference to tell either way.

So after trying the combination with a 5 and it failing several times, I tried the Pitt code, even though I knew that would make no sense based on the documentation I held. That didn't work. So I went into the clues menu and forced it right down to the last clue, so it gave me the answer. Sure enough, the menu answer is not what I was reading in the art.

Naturally I flipped out and Alt-F4'ed. I've got better games to play and catch up on, instead of going cross-eyed and myopic from examining pixels in minute detail.


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There is no game here. If you want to be Sherlock and follow logical clues and not be forced to cheat to figure out the answers, then this is not for you.

On the other hand, if you want to torture yourself, or you feel the need to experience how NOT to make an enjoyable game, then this is for you.