https://www.gog.com/news/coming_soon_the_sinking_city

I am not sure what point you are trying to make? It was removed from here and steam as it is epic exclusive. There is some speculation that it may release here in June, but who knows, maybe steam only for a year.

The game was announced as an Epic launch exclusive during Gamescom 2019 (in March)

In July 2019, GOG announced the game was coming here, and it was listed in the "coming soon" for quite some time.,

Now it's been removed, from both GOG and Steam (not that I want to buy in on Steam if there's a GOG option, but it's another part of the story)

So since this is announcement for another FrogWares game, I'm curious what happened to the one announced previously.

Click on the link. Read the comment thread. Realize you are mistaken about the situation.

The game being a timed exclusive to Epic was known prior to that announcement of a later GOG release. It was not removed and made exclusive.

Okay, my comment was based on the written description, but now I've watched the trailer- yeah, you're right, there's no way that guy really exists.

But I am not. The situation is that the game page for this game was removed from all stores as it was an epic exclusive:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/750130/
The devs themselves state this in the first block on the steam page! I did t say it was removed from sale as it wasn’t for sale, just that it was removed from the stores.
Also note that the devs state for a minimum of 1 year, they could have a deal for 10 years exclusivity. Heck, maybe that’ll be the next freebie on epic!

You can shove your your angsty teenage "Holmes", and I don't mean up your "mind palace".

Thank you for the thought. I'm a Sherlock Holmes fan and I find this interesting. A Gothic Sherlock, that's interesting. Let's judge the game when we play it.

Just not feeling "Young Sherlock Holmes." While the temptation is always to define origins, IMO the strength of Holmes is in the inability to define his genius. After watching the trailer, I can already tell this isn't the Homes I'm looking for. I prefer him solving mysteries with Watson and leaving the player / watcher / reader to imagine those "early years." IMHO this is a situation where a fan's imagination will always win out.

Now, what I wouldn't mind seeing... er... playing...

... is an old Holmes somewhat like the movie Mr Holmes. I'd love to play as the master detective when he has to battle age, growing drug dependency (or the end of that road), poor choices, and a failing genius.

But that's just me.

Gotta dig out my Jeremy Brett discs!

This looks like it's going to be an even bigger travesty than the "new-age" Sherlock Holmes in recent TV series and games. Frogwares has taken Holmes downhill fast in their games for sure, I have no doubt this will follow suit.

From the description of the "key pillars", they should have just written a game about an original character (ANY character, really, since they're making it sound almost like an RPG with all the supposed "choices").

And to top it off, I'm sure they'll have massive flashing icons whenever your "skills" will be of use, because gamers these days apparently can't figure out where to use skills themselves without being told in some kind of permanent tutorial mode.

Such a shame to see yet another franchise destroyed due to a company changing a well-established character to fit the ideals of today's random moron.

All it needs is completely-out-of-place contemporary political ideas shoved in there with a massive ham fist, and it's GOTY time!

Bleurgh....
Wait, so it's Sherlock Holmes Fight Club? ;)

Those screenshots scream "very early in development" to me.

I am also afraid of what will become of new entries in the Frogwares series. Silver Earring, The Awakened, Arsene Lupin, Jack The Ripper, Testament are all great games. Although hard games in general, they are very fitting and well-built around the character of Sherlock Holmes.

I haven't yet played Crimes and Punsihments (but looking forward to when I find some time).

I also heard / read a lot of bad things about the Devil's Daughter so I will probably stay away from that one.

With this one now, they seem to be changing their philosophy again to yet another type of gameplay. Well, I hope we are all wrong about these mixed first impressions.

Exactly! That's the vibe I got immediately from watching the trailer :)

There's no way I'm going to play Devil's Daughter from what I've read about it, it sounds absolutely dreadful.

Crimes and Punishments is a decent game, the plot and characters are certainly fitting, for the most part. Although the final part seemed a tad out of place to me, but not terribly so - and at least one has the options about which path to go. One of the paths definitely didn't feel like something Holmes would do in my view.

The main issue I had with Crimes and Punishments was that the game seemed to be in a continuous "tutorial mode" - whenever you could use one of your abilities, there was a big flashing icon letting you know to activate it. For an old-school adventure gamer, it seemed kind of insulting, especially since we're supposed to play one of the greatest ever detectives. I guess they figured this was his brilliant genius letting us know subconsciously or something - at least rationalising this way allowed me to still enjoy the game.

On the plus side, I did enjoy the deduction/analysis portion of the game - it IS actually possible to come up with a completely wrong conclusion (sometimes even several), so that was a nice touch. I also liked the option of what to do about the perp at the end of each case - sure it was very Telltale-like in how it shoved CHOICES at you, but it still worked well and still suited the context.

Plus most (all?) cases featured at least one or more puzzles of varying complexity, and thankfully the obvious solution wasn't rammed into our faces that much most of the time. So solving those felt satisfying too.

So I'd recommend getting Crimes and Punishments for sure. But I suspect it marks the turning point, where Frogwares started incorporating elements to please the more "casual" crowd - which then intensified with the next title with the addition of action sequences apparently. I can't really see them making an about-face at this point, but one never knows...

A prequel for Sherlock Holmes? Come on Frogwares, that rarely works.

"You can now decide to involve random people on the streets in your investigation, ask them for directions or question those citizens who you think match the suspect's profile. And if you doubt they would even talk to a foreigner like (Sherlock) - you can for instance find the right disguise, say a police uniform to loosen their tongue. It's up to you to discover that synergy and use it at the right time because, as I mentioned there's minimal hand-holding in the game."

That's neat - could you do anything like that in the previous games?