I am new to the Sherlock Holmes series but having had a recent interest in some detective games it seemed like a good fit - Crimes and Punishment was pretty highly rated and it turns out it was for good reason, too! C&P is a set of six individual cases for you to investigate, each with their own locations to comb for clues, suspects to interrogate, and conclusions to draw. They are not specifically strung together although there is a broader story occuring during the course of the game that gets touched on occasionally before it comes to a head at the end. The high point of the game has to be drawing conclusions; after gathering appropriate evidence, you link them together to make some kind of determination - a murder weapon, a motive, an inconsistency in a story - with different options for what *really* happened. And the best part is that the game doesn't hold your hand by directly signifying what the **right** decision is in the moment. While ultimately there is a correct conclusion to come to in the cases, you are never meant to feel like you made a mistake as Sherlock can describe clearly how one would come to a given conclusion. There are also a variety of minigames to occupy a little bit of your time on a case. Not all of them are particularly stellar, but they aren't that difficult either. There is no penalty for failure, but you may have to repeat some several times before you succeed if you don't want to simply skip the puzzle or minigame. The only real knocks I have against the game are that it feels a little thin at times, and there can be a lot of time spent just loading between zones. Each case took a little over an hour to complete, and that was with uncovering all the evidence and completing all the puzzles; much of that involved fast travel between points or wondering why an objective wasn't completed because there was some innocuous element I didn't catch on first inspection of an area. But all in all, an excellent little adventure game.
