The Testament of Sherlock Holmes

Some fix seems to be missing in the GOG version of this game - it always crashed on both save and autosave in the Whitechapel chapter. Any workarounds on the Internet didn't work for me (e.g. changing resolution to lowest). Then I noticed I already bough the game some years ago on Steam - that version worked out of the box :-/ So I can't recommend to buy the GOG version of The Testament of Sherlock Holmes. Didn't have these problems with the GOG version of Sherlock Holmes Nemesis.

I can't understand the positive reviews, because this game is just trash! Holmes is insufferable and Watson is a complete moron, and it's not fun playing either of them. The game forces you, as Watson, to do the obviously stupid thing so that you, as Holmes, can snark about it. It's just dumb. Early on in the game, after a sequence that makes little sense, a whole section of exposition, which also makes little sense, is simply announced by Watson as being detailed in a note from Holmes (because why bother adding something to the game when you can just lazily hand-wave it away). To make matters worse, the note itself is actually written by Watson (apparently writing a note to himself to explain things to himself?) in which he quotes bits of what Holmes supposedly said. It's very lazy, really badly done, and makes no sense. It has dialogue "trees", but the dialogues are mainly linear. I think they only added this pointless mechanic to disguise the few times when a choice of dialogue leads to an achievement (usually by choosing for Holmes to do something awful). It's probably there for some half-hearted excuse for "replayability". However, there's no real way of knowing the outcome of a particular choice (or if there is even a choice at all), so it just pushes the player to use a wiki rather than risk having to slog through this tripe several times. Lots of assets recycled from previous games. Lots of exposition and bad writing. Lots of on-rails gameplay. Lots of "move the tiles around to unlock the box" puzzles. Lots and lots and lots of crashes. Oh my God, the crashes. I hope you like replaying the same tedious section over and over again because it crashes all the time but particularly during saving. Maybe the game is trying to save you from itself. There are good ones in the series, but this isn't one of them.

It's really rough, this game. There are three camera modes; first person, third person, and third person point-and-click. In first person, it's fine, but third person is severely broken (in my personal experience, but I've seen plenty of posts and threads about this online). Your character will get stuck walking with no way to stop, certain directions will or will not work, it's entirely unplayable this way. Third person Point-and-click seems to be a feature strictly added to tick the box, the camera angles are generally awkward and it's overall not a pleasant experience. The voice acting is hit-or-miss at best, in terms of casting as well as performance, as is the writing. The character's mouths almost never sync up with the voice lines either. You get inappropriate music cues that loop endlessly, for example, not far into the game there's an overall slow section in a prison which has uptempo action music playing throughout while you're just walking around inspecting stuff and talking to people. It creates a dissonance which makes the music feel obnoxious and distracting. The transitions between scenes, areas, or levels all feel jumpy and sloppy as well. I suppose a vivid description of my experience could be that, even though it was made in Unity and overall looks quite good, it feels like you're playing an iPad game that was ported to PC and consoles. I've had the same experience (albeit even more so) with one of the Poirot games; The ABC Murders. Plenty has been written here already about the story and puzzles and so on, and the general consensus (at the time of writing) is generally favorable, but I really wanted to add this because the fact of the matter is: I'm not a snob or very picky or overly critical about any of the types of issues mentioned above and have played many much older and arguably 'clunkier' games, AND I'm a Holmes and general whodunnit fan, but I just couldn't get into this one. Couldn't finish it. It's just not a fun experience.

A good Sherlock Holmes game with a captivating mystery, good writing, good voice acting especially for Holmes and just slightly janky gameplay. Recommended for fans of the great detective with just one mention, get the 4GB patch to increase stability and be sure it won't crash on saving especially later on in more busy sections, otherwise no complaints and if you get it on sale with a healthy discount all the better.

Imagine if someone has heard about sherlock Holmes, but never read anything of A.C. Doyle. Then, imagine fiurther, if said someone never got as far as getting a grip on logic, or investigation. Now, if this individual were to design a game, it might look like this. Contra Only 3 Investigations for the whole game, those are ...mediocre at best. A cartload of puzzles, ranging from laughable simple to mind-bending obscure. If you are happen to be color-blind, tough luck. Biggest challenge is mostly to figure out what to do, and how. Lore-braking in a way that borders on hilarious. No spoilers here, just wait for the end. Objects tend to appear in previous searched locations only after something else triggered. Bad, bad design. First radio transmission 1883 by Tesla (sort of), 1904 Marconi. Radar the same, Hülsmeyer 1904. I don't mind tweaking dates a bit, but that was a bit too much. Just wait for it. Of course, Watson would ignore floating corpses. Just, you know, wait for it. Pro No crashes for the whole gameplay. Graphics and sound are decent, for their time even really good. Got this in a sale for the price of a glas of soda. Okay for this, but not more.