I've owned this for ages, but hardware limitations meant I didn't really get going on it until recently, and that was after I'd played The Awakened. It's nice to better grasp some of the references there, and appreciate just how young and emotionally fragile Holmes is, while the mysteries help build his character into more of what we see in the books. Slightly opaque instructions and an odd combat system (shoot vulnerable points then QTE to deliver knockout blows) are all that stop this being a 5* for me. In addition to tackling some dark topics and questioning Holmes's stability, it's loaded with Frogwares' sense of humour. I just went from a quite horrible murder scene to, well, picking whether I was going to generate a "teasing trumpet" or a salacious one... This is great.
Dark Dreams Don't Die is a peculiar little offering. Its origins as an XBox1 title are clear, given the reliance on gesticular controls. I can imagine most of them working very well on Kinect but there were several where I was really grateful for the mouse. Out of the gate, though, this game is weird. Dreamlike is an overused term but it suits D4 down to the ground. Having played straight through Prologue-end of Episode 2 in two sessions I can safely say I am still rather baffled as to the actual plot but I am intrigued enough to be keen on getting Series 2. I ran this on stream with vocal contributors from Discord and its certainly a game that stimulates debate and theorising :-) The QTE elements are not infrequent (most combat and dramatic situations) and are handled with reasonably forgiving sweeping mouse gestures rather than key presses, which make a lot of sense in the context of the action and are therefore far less annoying than their finger-twisting keyboard cousins. Look at everything, talk to everyone, eat anything you find, drink tequila, wrestle a strange woman dressed as a cat and try to solve the murder of your wife. It's a truly fun ride with a graphical style I haven't seen before:-)
