A solid adventure game and Sherlock Holmes' adventure. It's quite gory, there's a lot of deduction work involved and the puzzles aren't too tough. Loved the idea of putting Holmes and the Ripper together since both figures were contemporaries. Also, since I know a bit about the Whitechapel murders, I recognized that the writers did their research on the crimes; for that, they need to be praised. Lovely music and good graphics: not amazing, but the details were there, making victorian London a sight to see. Ran smoothly on my oldie laptop.
A good adventure game and a very interesting take on a Sherlock Holmes' type of case; the mix with the Cthulhu mythos worked amazingly. However, I found it not to be as good as its sucessor, 'Sherlock Holmes vs Jack the Ripper'. Midway through the game, the actions and the puzzles became mostly sorely unintuitive; in order to interact and/or pick up some objects, you had to perform a specific series of actions, even if you already knew what to do; it was very frustrating. The puzzles in the last part were a mixed bag as well; some of them required mathematical knowledge (which I do not possess), others wanted you to know things I believe you had no way of knowing beforehand or were mentioned way back - such as the symbol of the Old Ones -, and the Scotland map puzzle was absolutely ridiculous; the map was immense and you had to ciick on a VERY specific point in it in order to continue. With the Remastered version came a strategy guide, but I found it to be mostly useless, what with it being awfully vague. It was a shame really, since the ambience, the music, the art and the voice acting were mostly lovely. Although the dark element of the Cthulhu mythos was very welcome and well done, I felt the story could have gone deeper - it felt as if the huge amount of gory and bloody elements were just there to shock.
I've played my fair share of RPG games and I can say without a doubt that "Shadowrun Returns" is one of the good ones. With an old-school feel to it, it manages, as a whole, to balance everything very well: gameplay, story, art, music, atmosphere, difficulty, etc. The story was really great - at least for me personally. There's lots of mystery and twists and turns to go around. Another thing I welcomed was how this game world manages to mix in fantasy and future in the same setting, and does it successfully; with this, I was thus introduced to the Shadowrun world. Although gameplay-wise it's quite simple, it still managed to be challenging and even frustrating at times. The only fault I can point out is regarding how the game itself is very linear. I think I can understand why the creators would go for such a thing, since the story itself is quite simple. Nonetheless, linearity is a feature one is not used to see in an RPG, even in old ones! Despite all this, I still highly enjoyed "Shadowruns Returns" and I actually felt that its simplicity was a breath of fresh air in the RPG genre.
