Sherlock Holmes versus Jack the Ripper

Solid 8/10 for me. Characters are for the most part well modeled and voiced. Sherlock Holmes' & Dr. John Watson's personalities are held very close to the original material by Sir Doyle. Ripperologists will find in delight, that the locations and murder cases contain a very high amount of detail - some of the locations were recreated exactly as they were. The Whitechapel area was a bit consolidated to be a bit more compact for gaming purposes as no one would enjoy backtracking through a third of London. I personally also like the fact that the victims' cases were treated with respect. Regarding gameplay, this is essentially a point and click adventure but it may come as a surprise that it can be entirely enjoyed in first person perspective as well. More often than not, the player will be tasked with some "fetch quests" before being able to proceed with the story. Many puzzles have to be solved, and fortunately, none were repeated within this game. But be warned that some puzzles may be entirely void of logic and require trial and error (or a look in a walkthrough) to be solved. Due to this, I deduct one point out of ten. From the technical point of view, the game will run out of the box, but the graphic settings might not. I had to install an older version of the d3d9.dll that can be found on the Nexus (google "d3d9 fix for Fallout"). Also, saving the game did not work in three out of four cases - I set the compatibility mode for this game's exe file to "win xp". In addition, I had to install a patch that made this game's exe large address aware (google "techpowerup large address aware" for an easy to use executable). Unfortunately, this doesn't solve the slight but noticable performance problems. I deduct one point out of ten due to the technical issues.

I get why some people may not like this game. Sure, it may be a bit boring for some people, especcialy with the other tasks you have to do in order to continue the investtigation. Plus, there are some glitches with newer hardware, as well as some outlandish puzzles. With that said, I think this a briliant idea for a video game. Shherlock investigating the Jacck the Ripper cases, how can that not be an amazing idea. I loved the parts when Sherlock and Watson go to each of the crimescenes to investigate each murder, using thier deduction board to figure out what happened to the victims and Jack's MO. Some of the puzzles were really interesting as, like the puzzle with the heart in the jar or the suitcase with all the battles on it. The main problem with this game is it's age. It does work on a Windows 10 omputer, but there are some glitches that can occur. For example, one or more of the puzzles can be glitccched out do to higher resolutions. However, they can be completed, but it an annoy you when it happens. Some people don't like the side jobs that need to be ccompleted before the investigation continues. I get that it can be tedious for some, but I don't think it ruins the game. They ccan be fun at times. Overall, I think this a wonderful game for those who love Action/Adventure games. Is it the best of the series? No, Crimes and Punishment gets that accoloade. However, this is a worthwhile game to play!

To be fair, I mostly enjoyed the game, so let's start with the good: the primary voice actors (Sherlock and Watson) were, in my opinion, fantastic; the music was atmospheric and generally well-suited to the evolving stages of the story; much of the information provided was relevant to the time; the pacing was decent; the conclusion was believable and didn't clash with the known facts surrounding the actual events. Moving on to the bad: some of the voice acting for the background and side characters ranged from terrible to mediocre; certain puzzles required knowledge that many players likely had to look up (ie: dates and outcomes of historic events specific to a country not involved in the story); discrepencies between dialogue and subtitles (mostly minor, some major); use of fonts that did not exist at the time. And now the UGLY: the dialogue and subtitles cut out on a key cutscene. After more than an hour combing the internet, I can only conclude that it was intentional. Nonetheless, it was jarring, it took me out of the moment, and it left me disatissfied and bloody FURIOUS.

It's a pretty good game. The story is told well and I was happy to play it through all the way. There's a few fetch quests which could probably have been replaced with something more engaging, but they don't really detract from the overall experience and at least they add some variety. I found the story to be tense, exciting, captivating and well paced, with some enjoyable puzzles throughout. Some of the logic is a bit crazy, and Holmes, at times, seems to assume "facts" out of nowhere, rather than use logic or evidence, but it wasn't too often like that and I didn't have any eye-rolling moments. I never felt like it was a chore - slogging away just to get to the bitter end, like some other games - I genuinely enjoyed it with keen interest. The graphics are pretty good for its age and it ran really well on the highest settings. It (sort-of) supports widescreen (both in resolution and with a "widescreen" setting in the options), but it's still stretched, at least in the menus anyway. There's a few tips on the "PC Gaming Wiki" for setting things up, but that site points to the wrong file locations. The files you might want to edit (game.ini and user.ini) are actually both in the basegame folder. I changed the fov to 90 in the game.ini and that made it look a lot better. There was an occasional issue with the lighting (some objects seemed to lose some lighting after interaction) but it didn't actually cause any problems with gameplay. It crashed once or twice (when rebinding the keys or changing options after playing the game) but never during gameplay.

I had a lot of fun playing this, and considerable effort must of gone into tying up the real world facts and Holmes' story. Good characters, good dialogue, OK voice acting, and a very 'real' 1880's Whitechapel. I mean they really don't pretty it up. Had some trouble getting it running properly on Win11, but got it working fine with various patches. There is a bug for some regarding drawing an ellipse on a map, I had it, and it's solved buy drawing a slightly larger circle. It's all on the web. 5 stars seems a little too keen given some of the technical issues, but honestly, as a fan of the books, true crime, and detective stories, this is great fun.