Sherlock Holmes versus Jack the Ripper

Incredibly immersive and very realistic.

Interesting puzzles but the UI and some part of the game design are very frustrating. In fact i gave up after nearly 10 hours ... I was near the end of the game and i was stuck on a puzzle that did not allow me to continue even if i did everything right. Is it a bug or am i missing something ? I don't care, I don't have time to waste fighting against bad game design Ambiance was good, even if the graphics are a bit old.

Sherlock Holmes versus Jack the Ripper is a point-and-click adventure game set in the world of Arthur Conan Doyle's detective, Sherlock Holmes and his sidekick, Dr Watson. This time you are up against the infamous Jack the Ripper, and have to solve the mysteries surrounding some pretty gruesome murders. The game offers players two different perspectives: a third-person view in the pure style of traditional point ’n’ click adventure games and a first-person view for close-up investigation. This helps with some of the frustrating pixel-hunting you have to do to find the clues.

Very dark (to be expected given the subject matter), very well-researched for historical details and detective techniques. The continuity/flow was by far the best of the series I have seen thus far, and I never got lost or went off-track enough that I needed to find unintuitive hints from walkthroughs as I did with some of the other titles; this also applies to the puzzles. The visuals, audio and music are always excellently atmospheric in this series. I would easily give this five stars, except for the currently unpatched bug where the ability to save stops working, which means progress in the current session since the last save may be lost. Check the forum thread "Sherlock Holmes vs Jack the Ripper not possible to save" for an actual solution. Note: I lived with the bug and only found this thread when I was near the endgame so did not implement the fix. I noticed that sometimes it can start working again if it stops (Windows moving things around in memory?) but this is unpredictable. Given that the solution is a simple flag on the executable, it probably should have been resolved years ago.

The game has you playing as either Sherlock Holmes or Dr. Watson in a quest to uncover the identity of Jack the Ripper, the infamous serial killer who terrorized the poverty-stricken district of Whitechapel in London and slew 5 sex workers. The developers of the game have clearly done their research on many of the details known about the crimes committed and they've done an amazing job building up their case for why their guy is Jack The Ripper, although I do believe that part of the reason he was chosen is that it would be bizarre for them to not neatly tie up all the loose ends in a detective story, especially one featuring the famous Sherlock Holmes. While the game makes for a decent detective story in the Sherlock Holmes franchise and some of the puzzles do require a little pen and paper to properly solve, the game suffers from a few problems which I believe mostly come down to the game having a low budget. Visually, the game has decent graphics but the game is sometimes dull in its art style. The lack of shaders or visual effects like fog also makes the game feel slightly unfinished and lacking a lot of polish. There are also a lot of reused models, which can make a lot of characters in the game feel indistinguishable from the rest of the NPCs. There is also a weird glitch in the magician's level where the cart goes back to its spot and then disappears. It's not a game-breaking glitch fortunately since you can finish that part of the game pretty fine. Another thing is that the music, which although decent, feels like the developers got their hands on a few royalty-free recordings of 19-20th century classical music. It doesn't feel like the music was made specifically for the game, resulting in a noticeable lack of atmosphere. The NPC interactions are rather dull, discouraging players from exploring Whitechapel. The game can be finished in about less than 10 hours if you know your way around the puzzles.