Sherlock Holmes Chapter One Deluxe Edition

in library

4/5

( 18 Reviews )

18 Reviews

English & 15 more

Posted on: August 30, 2024

not_a_llama

Verified owner

Games: 56 Reviews: 4

Disappointing

This may be the worst Sherlock Holmes game I have ever played, but it works flawlessly on Linux using Proton. It has the main story of the Sherlock and his mother is fine, but this games tries so hard to be an open world game and fails in every aspect of it. Open world is unpolished, it looks like a game from 15 years ago. And yet, you can purchase different furniture for your mansion, without any purpose. There isn't much more to do in the open world. There are "chemical analysis" mini-games, they are at the kindergarteners level. And to end it all, UX in this game is just awful. You can't select conversation options with the keyboard, you can't select the clues with the mouse, and the worst of the all, you can't pause the game mid-conversation.

Is this helpful to you?

Posted on: December 5, 2024

pilgrimgog

Verified owner

Games: 15 Reviews: 1

Unstable and Inherently Irritating

Ok, first things first. If you're looking for a classic Sherlock Holmes related game then Crimes and Punishment is the one to go for. It's authentic, voice acting top notch and it's what you will be expecting. The Jack The Ripper game is also very good. After this Frogware just seems to degrade into insanity. Along comes Chapter One. This game is literally unplayable for me despite me having the Lambourgini of laptops, a 14" Razer Blade Laptop consisting of: The latest AMD Ryzen 9 7940HS processor NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 GPU with 8GB GDDR6 VRAM 16 GB on-board RAM Direct X 12 This laptop breezes through with games like The Witcher 3, Dishonoured 2 and the like. Sherlock Holmes Chapter One ran and then after 30mins or so crashed out and repeated attempts to play resulted in more crashes. Something is clearly wrong with the game imho. Searching the net suggested I pull the high screen resolution down a few notches. I was running at 2560 x 1600 as per my high spec Lambo machine. I dropped it down a few notches in the games own options menus and the game then stuttered, took ages to get through the opening menus and couldn't be played. Went to my desktop to restore the screen resolution only to find that option was now greyed out !! What the heck! So by altering the screen resoltuion in this game's options menu I can no longer change the screen res of my laptop in the native Windows controls. Unbelievable! I've had to do a system restore to the point before I installed the game to get things back to normal. What I did get to play of the game was just awful. It's a real mess. The character is nothing like Sherlock Holmes, his clothing is just farcical and Watson is a complete mess constantly referring to Holmes as Sherry. There's nothing of the Conan Doyle books here imho. It's a travesty. Greatly disappointed as I was loving the Crime and Punishments game and really just wanted more of that. This one is to be avoided imo.

Is this helpful to you?

Posted on: December 14, 2024

dkendon

Verified owner

Games: 76 Reviews: 9

Ok, not as good as Crimes & Punishments

Frogwares tried something different, but in putting all the effort into an open world it meant the core gameplay suffered. The core missions are reasonable, with similar gameplay to Crimes&Punishments. Some of the plotlines are quite good. I found the observation deductions were a bit tricky because some of the relevant info you need to make a deduction isn't revealed until later in the conversation. Likewise in several of the cases the evidence is 50/50 and could go both ways, so it comes down to luck rather than good deduction. (You can tell if you got it right by the amount of money you earn from cases - the game won't tell you). The game does give you icons next to each bit of evidence to indicate next steps. I think it would be unplayable without these. There are several new mechanics that were not so good. The 'eavesdropping' ended up almost always as guessing and brute-forcing the solution. Questioning the public was ok (use Concentration to check how they will react to you) but didn't really add anything - you just walk around until you find a friendly person. The addition of combat was not required. In the game you have the option to skip it, which is good. The sidekick 'Jon' was mostly annoying. The game has 'Jon's diary' but I never saw the point in this as it mostly fills up with repeated reactions to whether Sherlock gets the right answer first time in the archives or when questioning people. There are a lot of side quests, but they don't engage all the mechanics, ad some are pretty lame. I would have liked less open world and more fully developed cases with all the mechanics (eg mind palace) rather than a 'case' just being walking through an area with a lot of clicking. I liked the addition of maths puzzles (the chemical analysis sections) but even when on hard mode they were still really easy. I also found the ending a bit lame, especially compared to Crimes and Punishments.

Is this helpful to you?

Posted on: December 13, 2021

resty

Verified owner

Games: 1013 Reviews: 11

11 out of 10

11 out of 10, I just lost 50 hours of my life, and I want to do it again. New masterpiece

Is this helpful to you?

Posted on: February 6, 2025

GrumpyElk

Verified owner

Games: 193 Reviews: 7

Cases feel overly contrived

The mechanics, graphics, voice acting. Still good, or at least good enough. The only downside that disappointed me again and again, was the writing. Not all of it. Some background stories are great, heartbreaking even. But the solutions to a lot of the cases felt generated after a repeating principle: I find the likely murder weapon, imply the motive, find the time window and the likely culprit. And then I do the exact same thing again for another person, who astonishingly has a motive, a window of opportunity and a similar weapon. For me the parts of these cases felt generically glued together which took away a portion of the fun I had when I started investigating. The extra effort that was put into the story to keep the case interesting backfired and felt unreal, ridiculous even. And so I put the game down again and again. Play another case month later, finish the case and regret the time I spent with it ... to pick it up again a few month later ... to be dissappointed again. It is not a bad game, but it is not good either.

Is this helpful to you?

...

Discover CD PROJEKT RED games

Highlights

Featured

Close, but not an exact hit

Sherlock Holmes Chapter One Deluxe Edition

Other ratings

Add a review

Edit a review

Delete this review?

Report this review

Additional Details (required):

Report this review