Posted on: January 18, 2022

Crystal_Flight

Spiele: 98 Rezensionen: 3

Somber adventure, unintuitive gameplay

A good adventure game and a very interesting take on a Sherlock Holmes' type of case; the mix with the Cthulhu mythos worked amazingly. However, I found it not to be as good as its sucessor, 'Sherlock Holmes vs Jack the Ripper'. Midway through the game, the actions and the puzzles became mostly sorely unintuitive; in order to interact and/or pick up some objects, you had to perform a specific series of actions, even if you already knew what to do; it was very frustrating. The puzzles in the last part were a mixed bag as well; some of them required mathematical knowledge (which I do not possess), others wanted you to know things I believe you had no way of knowing beforehand or were mentioned way back - such as the symbol of the Old Ones -, and the Scotland map puzzle was absolutely ridiculous; the map was immense and you had to ciick on a VERY specific point in it in order to continue. With the Remastered version came a strategy guide, but I found it to be mostly useless, what with it being awfully vague. It was a shame really, since the ambience, the music, the art and the voice acting were mostly lovely. Although the dark element of the Cthulhu mythos was very welcome and well done, I felt the story could have gone deeper - it felt as if the huge amount of gory and bloody elements were just there to shock.

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Posted on: March 8, 2022

Hanglyman

Bestätigter Besitzer

Spiele: 444 Rezensionen: 143

Tedious and Wooden

I'm a big fan of both Sherlock Holmes and the Cthulhu mythos, but this game falls pretty flat. The low production values constantly prevent immersion, as the character animations are jerky, misaligned and off-putting, the environments are somewhat dull and empty, and the voice acting is fairly bad, aside from Holmes and Watson, who are passable. The puzzles vary wildly in difficulty, from simply picking up an object and using it somewhere else to decoding a very difficult cipher, and often you'll require items that are easy to miss because they blend into the background. For the most part they feel like busywork and most often lack the satisfying feel that you get from solving a puzzle in other adventure games. There are also a lot of parts where you can't use an object yet until something else arbitrary happens, despite there being no logical reason, such as a lemon tree that protects you from mosquitos... but you can only pick the lemons AFTER you use it as a weight in another puzzle, leave, then come back later. Watson is portrayed as a bit dimwitted, something I was never fond of, and the plot, while understandable, is a bit convoluted and not very engaging. This remastered edition adds a third-person perspective, a terrible addition that only slows the game down more and makes the controls more awkward, and I recommend switching to first-person and staying there. In the game's defense, the parts set in Louisiana manage to generate some atmosphere, the few areas where Holmes encounters the cult manage to be somewhat creepy and disturbing (the trees that seem to sway on their own were a nice detail), there's one surprising twist, and they don't completely botch the source material. But with so many other mystery and Lovecraft games out there now, this one has very little to offer in comparison, and is probably not worth your time.

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Posted on: June 8, 2017

pahster

Bestätigter Besitzer

Spiele: 353 Rezensionen: 11

Freakin' tedious

I love Sherlock Holmes. This isn't Sherlock Holmes. At first the game seemed interesting but I soon discovered this was only a thin patina overlaying a jumble of problems and shortcomings. First there is the issue of mobility. For some bizarre reason they decided to have the camera angle swing around at all sorts of crazy angles so you're never quite sure what direction you are going. It's not hard to end up accidentally backtracking because of this. It makes finding anything ridiculously complicated. And the map doesn't help at all because you can walk right by a place you will need to visit and if its not "time" to visit it yet, it won't mark it on the map - so you'll have to wander around until you find it again later. And I do mean "wander" - fully 3/4ths of this game is just wandering around until you accidentally find what you don't even know you're supposed to be looking for yet. Then there are the game mechanics which you only find out by trial and error and accident. For instance, there is a "look around you" view that has to be implemented by pressing the middle mouse scroll wheel (on my mouse, at least) and which is exited by pressing the scroll wheel again. Once something is in your inventory you CANNOT examine it - there is no "look at" feature, which is freakin' crazy in a game that is all about finding and examining clues! And to "use" an item, you click on it in the inventory, exit the inventory, and then click around trying to figure out if it has a use in your current location. It gives no signal that you are "using on", you just have to hope you accidentally come across a hotpoint you can "use" it on. The cursor doesn't give any indication what mode you are in. Sometimes it shows a pipe - I have no idea what that is supposed to signify. Sometimes you move by clicking with the pipe and sometimes it turns into footprints - either way you walk. It seems to have 3 forms - pipe, footprints, and magnifying glass - there is no special cursor indicating you are currently trying to use an item as there is with EVERY single other point-and-click game I have ever played. As for the so-called "puzzles" around the clues themselves, again, you end up solving them mostly by accident - not even by guess and by golly, just pure accident. At one point I knew what the intent of a puzzle was, but in no way could I actually get things to line up in order to actually SOLVE the puzzle, in large part because I was presented with a new game mechanic - an inset of the full scene down in one corner superimposed there, and no amount of clicking helped me to figure out what mechanic I was supposed to be using at that point. Even reading a walkthrough of that part didn't tell me how that mechanic was supposed to work. There are major discrepancies within the game itself. At one point Holmes finds a passport and states that the man is 36 years old, yet the birthdate (1852) on the passport and the date of entry into England (1894) makes it clear the man is 42 years old. The only way this could be true is if the man traveled 6 years into his own future before traveling to England - either that or our supersleuth has no mathematical skills to speak of. Some of the voice acting is good and some is just awful. Holmes himself is well-voiced. Watson seems OK. But an awful lot of the other voices are execrable. Especially the awful voice for the Baker Street Irregular posted outside Holmes' front door. Whoever did that should never be allowed to do a fake child's voice ever again, and whoever approved it ought to be shot. Or at least horse-whipped a little bit. I suppose I should have known to expect little from a game that mixes Holmes up with a cult of Cthulu. I never did get what was so awful about the whole Cthulu mythos - all that tommyrot about stuff man-was-not-meant-to-know-wot-of and the-knowledge-that-drives-men-mad. The idea of deep sea creatures feasting on human sacrifices may be grody but not particularly existentially terrifying. And Holmes' reaction when the little Cthulu-grubs come crawling out of that corpse was not "SHOOT THE BLIGHTERS, WATSON!" but "Well we should mosey on back to Baker Street now". Seriously. The one reason Holmes used to drag Watson around with him was so he could shoot things that needed to be shot, and if ever anything needed to be shot, it's meter long maggots crawling out of a corpse. Oh, and no sign of Holmes having called the coppers even up to and including the point where they leave England to travel to "the Continent". Yeesh! By the time the game crashed (at the cut scene where they are apparently on a train somewhere in Europe) I was thoroughly fed up. I won't be bothering to start over (no autosaves and I had covered so little content I hadn't thought to save since the bookshop). Even if I had a save near the crashpoint, this game with all its wandering around, the weird way the camera swings around, and the only real mystery being the game mechanics themselves, is just too tedious and no fun whatsoever. Plus being uber predictable. It's like being forced to read through a choose-your-own-adventure where someone else has already made all the choices. I specifically skipped the first game in this series because of its many problems. I don't know if any of the future games in this series are any better, but they're all coming off my wishlist at this point. This game is just so seriously flawed its not even worth the $2.50 I spent on it, and I don't feel like plunking down another $2.50 only to find another tedious wanderfest on my hard drive.

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Posted on: April 8, 2024

LeftHandedMatt

Bestätigter Besitzer

Spiele: 425 Rezensionen: 16

Confusing but it works... mostly

While it's a technical improvement over The Silver Earring, I think I enjoyed the story here a bit less. The Lovecraft inspired tale actually takes quite a backseat for most of the game's time, and when it does pop up it's not all that enthralling. But this is a better game to play through even with the janky 3D. This 2008 remastered version defaults to a new third person perspective instead of the game's original first-person and I much prefer playing in a more traditional 3rd person adventure view. I'm glad it was implemented, but it's not perfect. The option to switch between 3rd and 1st-person is there, and in several places it's essential to use both move around the environment. Again, the plot isn't told all that well and there's a lot that doesn't make sense (I assume due to the translation into English). Things happen without much explanation and the game seems to expect you to make huge leaps of deduction along with Holmes. I was fairly lost on what was going on and who was doing it by the end sections. Throw in some bafflingly difficult puzzles, made more difficult by an awkward interface, and you have a game that requires some dedication to get through. Yet the spirit of Sherlock Holmes is there and there's absolutely some fun to be had. I'm glad the game had a built in hint system because I sure needed it, even if it didn't provide quite enough help at times. I also encountered a horrible bug where the game wouldn't let me save in the final 2 hours which soured the experience.

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Posted on: March 29, 2025

Neverenderr87

Bestätigter Besitzer

Spiele: 20 Rezensionen: 1

Too many bugs

Buggy widescreen issues and inability to save the game often.

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Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened (2008)

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