Sherlock Holmes Chapter One - a new prequel Sherlock game from Frogwares

[Parsifarka]

And a PR statement from Frogwares:

This is still our biggest project yet in terms of size, gameplay time, new systems, open-world design and story. And we’re extremely proud of what we’ve made. We hope you'll enjoy it too. - Wael Amr, CEO, Frogwares

For a few years now, and I would dare say ever since the release of Sherlock Holmes vs Jack the Ripper back in 2009, every game they have made has been bigger and more ambitious than the previous one —also worse.

 

[Zombra]

As we near the release SHCO, we’re seeing a lot of comments excited for the game which is such an amazing feeling. But we also see a fair amount of comments comparing some of our stuff to much bigger and more expensive titles. We totally understand the demand for technically-flawless games. However when a team of our caliber creates a game, we need to prioritize what matters most - an emotional experience that is hopefully bigger than the sum of its technical parts.
It’s with this mindset and understanding that allowed us to make the game with no crunch. And why we’re able to publish it all on our own after 20 years of being forced to always sign away part of our creations. It’s also why we priced the game at 45 USD and not 70 USD.
This is still our biggest project yet in terms of size, gameplay time, new systems, open-world design and story. And we’re extremely proud of what we’ve made. We hope you'll enjoy it too. - Wael Amr, CEO, Frogwares

I preordered in part just to support them. Best testing indicates Frogwares are real nerds, in the best way. So delighted they've been able to move to self-publishing.

 

[Hellion]

About 25 hours in (review copy) and for the most part the game plays identically to The Sinking City as far as investigations are concerned, ie scanning for clues - interrogating NPCs - map and archives use, but there's lots more investigations to solve (TSC only had about 20) and not all of them require the use of archives or to search the map for the location. Some of TSC's other shortcomings seem to have been remedied as well; no more identical indoor locations, no crafting or "skill tree" mechanics, greater interaction with the open world (for example you can pick up new cases or clues for existing cases by eavesdropping on random NPC conversations)...

The combat sequences are rather forgetable, but they don't get too much in the way. Plus there's an option in the difficulty menu which allows you to skip almost all of them.

Apart from that, the fictional isle of Cordona where the game takes place is... weird, as far as its historical plausibility is concerned. It's supposed to be an alternate version of Malta I think, ruled by the British, having a distinct Italian culture, an old Knights Hospitaller presence and a predominantly Greco-Roman past, but for some reason more than half of the local population are Ottoman Turks and you see "Albanians/Arabs/Crimeans/Swedes/Germans" wandering around the streets like it's some sort of international hub.

But at least the Investigation aspect seems solid so far.

 

[Zombra]

Hellion If you don't mind my picking your brain, how are the UI options? Shutting off certain handholding UI elements made Sinking City a million times better for me - can the same be done here, or are all clues lit up with huge CLICK HERE IDIOT dots from blocks away?

 

[Strig]

Apart from that, the fictional isle of Cordona where the game takes place is... weird, as far as its historical plausibility is concerned. It's supposed to be an alternate version of Malta I think, ruled by the British, having a distinct Italian culture, an old Knights Hospitaller presence and a predominantly Greco-Roman past, but for some reason more than half of the local population are Ottoman Turks and you see "Albanians/Arabs/Crimeans/Swedes/Germans" wandering around the streets like it's some sort of international hub.

Might not be as daft as it could seem at a cursory glance. I think they smushed Cyprus and Malta together to implement the most interesting aspects of both islands in their setting, probably threw in a bit of ol' Constantinople for good measure. Sure, it would require a funky geographical location for Cordona, but as a fictional setting it could work.

I will, however, voice my doubts about the appearance of Sherlock. Lad looks like an absolute pillock. Why does he resemble a long lost Baldwin brother during a teenage steampunk-emo phase? And what the fuck is he even wearing? From what I can see he's not the only one looking like a clown from some low budget CW teen drama, but that does not excuse anything.

 

[Zombra]

I will, however, voice my doubts about the appearance of Sherlock. Lad looks like an absolute pillock. Why does he resemble a long lost Baldwin brother during a teenage steampunk-emo phase? And what the fuck is he even wearing? From what I can see he's not the only one looking like a clown from some low budget CW teen drama, but that does not excuse anything.

Not sure what you are blathering about. He looks exactly like one would expect a 25 years younger version of the canonical Frogwares character to look.

Chapter One Sherlock vs Testament Sherlock

 

[Hellion]

Hellion If you don't mind my picking your brain, how are the UI options? Shutting off certain handholding UI elements made Sinking City a million times better for me - can the same be done here, or are all clues lit up with huge CLICK HERE IDIOT dots from blocks away?

You can shut everything off here as well. Here's the difficulty menu:

I'm not exactly sure what "Decision-making Time" affects, as I haven't really encountered anything like that so far. It could refer to combat QTE's but there's a separate menu for combat difficulty.

There's also a "custom" difficutly settting which allows you to further tweak the experience.

 

[Zombra]

Fantastic.

Now watch as, just as with Sinking City, half the Codex proclaims the game brain dead because they themselves couldn't figure out how to change the difficulty settings.

 

[Strig]

Not sure what you are blathering about. He looks exactly like one would expect a 25 years younger version of the canonical Frogwares character to look.

I can see you're not sure, because his mug is not the problem and I only mentioned it jokingly. It's mostly his ridiculous garb I'm talking about. Victorian era clothing is anything but boring and what they present here is just a cosplayer's idea of what clothes of that era would look like.

And for the sake of being an absolute autistic cunt I will now list a few reasons why they couldn't be considered exactly the same person:
— younger man has a wider chin, if anything should be other way around
— mentolabial fold at a different level
— philtrum has different lengths in both men
— while lips shrink with age their shape wouldn't change as much (this applies to above points too)
— most damning of all is the ear shape, they're as distinct as fingerprints and these two are different people.

Cheers!

 

[Hellion]

You shouldn't take Sherlock's or Jon's clothing in this game too seriously.

 

[Infinitron]

Coming tomorrow:



https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/sherlock-holmes-chapter-one-review/

SHERLOCK HOLMES: CHAPTER ONE REVIEW
An ambitious detective sandbox with a younger, hotter Sherlock.

Sherlock Holmes: Chapter One feels like the ultimate expression of developer Frogwares' ambition for its venerable sleuthing series and, simultaneously, its strangest entry. It is nearly everything you could want from a game about the consulting detective, but also quite a few things that you could do without. It veers between greatness and absurdity, but if you've got an itch to solve some Victorian mysteries, there isn't a better salve.

Don't let the title fool you—this is not the first in a series of episodic games, but rather an origin story. In The Devil's Daughter, Frogwares transformed Sherlock Holmes into a brooding John Hamm look-alike, and here's it's doubled down, giving us a fresh-faced version of Sherlock who's clearly just walked out of a CW Network drama—probably one of the vampire ones—complete with a pout and a penchant for leather gloves.

Instead of being stuck in gloomy London, Sherlock's taken a trip to the sunny Mediterranean island of Cordona, where he lived as a child, to visit his mother's grave. There's no fog, no army of urchins and no Watson; all of which, it turns out, is actually a good thing. Unshackled from so many of the conventions of a Sherlock Holmes mystery, Chapter One takes bold, surprising and, yes, sometimes quite silly turns, and miraculously does that within an adventure that still feels true to the game series and the broader fiction.

Sherlock's constant companion, Jon, is a sort of proto-Watson, and really exemplifies how Chapter One adapts Arthur Conan Doyle's ancient character. Like Watson, Jon is a sounding board, motivator and confidant for Sherlock, as well as assisting in his cases. But unlike the good doctor, he's a bit of a rogue, with a playful, cheeky streak and a more fraternal relationship with Sherlock. He's also entirely imaginary.

Head games
Jon's status as a figment of Sherlock's imagination is revealed right after the prologue—a brisk but entertaining case involving a séance, a stolen diamond and a murder—but there are hints straight away, like how you never see him walking. You'll open a door and he'll just be there. He doesn't move, he appears. And there's often a hint of mischief. You might find him soaking his feet in a hotel water feature, mucking around on a piano, or painting on the ceiling. I appreciate this level of dedication to keeping the Creepy Watson meme alive.

While Frogwares has pitted Sherlock against eldritch cults and Jack the Ripper, this still feels pretty out-there. But for a series that, at least for the last couple of games, really pushes the concept of mind palaces and constructing mental crime scenes, the idea that Sherlock would also invent a companion to assist him in navigating life in general is maybe not such a huge leap. Jon's also another mystery to solve. He's been with Sherlock since childhood, a period of his life that's mostly a blank. Lost memories can be conjured up, however, filling the gaps in Sherlock's past with sketches superimposed onto the present. And while you're unravelling this story, at the heart of which lies the mystery of his mother's death, you're always a detective. The tools you use to solve crimes are the same ones you use to illuminate the past.

It dawned on me, somewhere between having visions, bantering with my sidekick, and putting crooks behind bars, that Chapter One is a superhero origin story specifically. In Crimes & Punishments, we had the middle-aged, stoic veteran of countless cases, deerstalker on his head, trustworthy Watson by his side, in complete command of his preternatural crime-solving powers. Chapter One's Sherlock is less refined, less in control, and is still trying to complete himself. And his best mate is an imaginary dude who likes booze and dinosaurs. And it works! Somehow. Maybe that shouldn't be too surprising. What is Batman if not an American Sherlock Holmes in fancy dress?

The Dark Knight and Sherlock have even more in common now that the latter has joined the ranks of open-world protagonists. Cordona is very far from Arkham's Gotham or Assassin's Creed's gargantuan spaces, however, for which I'm incredibly grateful. Instead, it's evocative of LA Noire and Mafia, where the cities are just elaborate stages. For the most part, the bustling island just lets you get on with the good stuff: solving cases. And oh boy are there a lot of them.

Forget, if you want, all the other stuff—this is Chapter One's greatest hook. A picturesque Mediterranean city that's filled to the brim with thefts, murders and conspiracies; case after case, cold for years or so hot the blood is still warm; and, as a treat, shops full of disguises for you to try on. It's a detective's paradise.

Outside of the main story's five mysteries, there are more than 30 side cases. That's a hefty chunk of delicious crime. You are free to take your time with them, switch back to the main story, and bounce between the ones you've already started. The cases range from simple things like 'which drunk idiot stabbed that other drunk idiot?' to chasing down an elephant who may have killed an important lead. The best cases, of course, are the bamboozlers that send you all over the city to research legal documents, interview suspects, solve riddles and do a spot of chemical analysis but, when you're craving that hit from putting another mystery to bed, it can be nice to just walk into a room, look at a crime scene, and say "That dude did it." And even the quickies can be engaging conundrums—Chapter One takes its cases pretty seriously.

Wrong turn
Like the last couple of games, the cases are made all the more gripping because you absolutely can get it wrong. You might make the wrong conclusions after observing a suspect, make the wrong deductions in your mind palace or, worst of all, accuse the wrong person. Then you just have to keep moving forwards and live with your mistakes. That's the important bit, though. The constant progression. Chapter One is a master of momentum, never letting you get stuck, even when you've got dozens of clues and no idea how to put them together. Everything in your case files comes with a text description that can give you a nudge in the right direction, but even more helpful are the red symbols attached to clues that let you know there's still more to glean and, crucially, how you go about doing that, without giving away too many specifics. You're still the one making all the important decisions and deductions, but with none of the faffing around or aimless wandering.

Even when that dreaded word "collectibles" rears its head, it's an easier pill to swallow because it just means more puzzles to solve. Back when Sherlock was a kid, his brother Mycroft pinched his coin collection and hid them all over the island. A decade later, you can try to find them all. Mycroft is a prize prick, so you'll have to jump through some hoops to get them, flexing those detective muscles as you piece together his clues. Thank goodness for horrible brothers, because it's one of the only collectible hunts I've enjoyed. Chapter One has a few of these diversions and, while they never reach the heights of the actual cases, they never feel like fluff. Indeed, you'll learn a lot more about Sherlock and Jon by completing them, making them an important piece of the narrative puzzle.

Nearly everything in the open world fits, but there's a glaring exception: bandit lairs. They are a surreal addition, if only because it makes absolutely no sense for them to be in this game of mystery and deduction. The cops are apparently overworked, so they let a 20-year-old nerd with a gun take out criminal gangs with no backup. You can go Victorian Rambo on their asses, but you're gently encouraged to cuff rather than kill. Go down this route and you'll still need to use your gun, however, by shooting environmental hazards or destroying the armour plates some of bandits have strapped onto themselves. After that you can stun them in a QTE and leave them for the lazy cops.

Watching Sherlock dish out all these beatdowns, it feels like one step towards Batman too far. Every other oddity has its place, like it's been thoughtfully included, but these pointless brawls are utterly incongruous to the rest of the game, like someone accidentally spilled some Far Cry on it in the middle of development. I'm not even entirely opposed to a Sherlock game having a few fights, but not these repetitive, wave-based arena brawls with vacuous goons. And sadly that's the only kind of fight Chapter One throws at you. The good news is that these lairs are so detached from the rest of the game that you can and should skip them. The bad news is that Frogwares is so inexplicably confident in the quality of these out-of-place bouts that it also chucks them into cases, making them unavoidable, though not common.

Sherlock still tends to find a way to handle most problems with words, running rings around everyone with his uncanny observations and revelations. He's even occasionally funny, playing off Jon, who brings it out in him, or resorting to some polite Victorian sarcasm when he's had enough of someone's bullshit. There's a playfulness to Chapter One that balances out the grim nature of Sherlock's work, both through the the characters and the gags that Frogwares has snuck into easy-to-overlook things, like innocuous items and disguise descriptions. Serious or silly, the dialogue often contributes just as much to the cases as the compelling mysteries themselves, and the quality of the writing is some of the studio's best.

Despite this, it does still stumble. There's the depiction of a trans man as, in Sherlock's words, "a woman who disguises herself as a man to achieve higher social position". He is also consistently misgendered by Sherlock, even in conversations where he's calling him by his chosen name. Neither Sherlock or Cordona are real, and the setting should serve the game, not the other way around, so the Victorians aren't to blame for Frogwares' misstep here. Or when it decided that searching from an African refugee should be a simple matter of asking the first random Black passer-by you can find. For a game with so much smarts, it can be very dumb.

Like the young detective himself, Chapter One is imperfect and sometimes awkward, but I still found myself dangling on its hook, hungry for more crimes. There is a very clear point of no return, and with a deadline looming I considered moving past it a few times, but I kept being drawn back by the cases I'd yet to close. And then I'd find completely new ones. The people of Cordona just cannot help but murder each other, for which I'm grateful. I begrudgingly polished off the story eventually, but I've still got a few outstanding conundrums to solve, and a save waiting for me. It's impressive that, as dense as it is, and as long as it is, it still manages to stay focused, bandit lairs aside, on the important stuff. It's a miracle—an open world with almost no bullshit. You're here to sleuth, and that's exactly what you'll get to do, nearly uninterrupted, for 40 hours.

THE VERDICT
80

SHERLOCK HOLMES CHAPTER ONE
An island full of riveting mysteries, stuck with some truly awful and jarring combat.

 

[Hellion]

I'm rather amused that some reviewers choose to pinpoint as "flaws" in the game stuff like the combat (there's literally an option titled "SKIP COMBAT" in the difficulty menu), the fact that Sherlock misgenders a cross-dressing woman, or an investigation that has to do with an african woman being rapped at a high-society party. Oh well.

 

[Zombra]

SHERLOCK HOLMES: CHAPTER ONE REVIEW

Lame spoiler.

 

[Infinitron]

https://af.gog.com/game/sherlock_holmes_chapter_one?as=1649904300

 

[Zombra]

Played a few minutes before work. I like a lot of what I see so far.

Interactive hotspots are tiny, meaning that turning Interactivity Icons off is nonviable. I had them turned off and walked around a room, clicking on every single person, and only two of them talked back to me. Then I turned icons on and did the same thing, finding that ALL of them would talk back to me, but only if I had the right pixel centered on my screen. I guess I'm okay with this UI blunder as Sinking City had a similar issue and was still excellent.

 

[Zombra]

The new chemical analysis minigame on high difficulty is no joke!

 

[Zombra]

Strig may be glad to learn that alternate outfits are available very early in the game. I was able to cover up the Twilight haircut and retire the shiny silk suit very quickly and gear Sherlock up into the subdued, earth-toned nerd he should be:

 

[bertram_tung]

i'm enjoying teh fuck out of this game. seems like master of deduction mode would be really difficult though. not sure if i would be able to find all the tiny objects without icons

 

[adddeed]

Glad this game is reviewing well.
Played all in the series, just finishing up Crimes and Punishments and then will do Delivs Daughter.

 

[Oropay]

3/7 rating (so far, early impressions) because of the technical problems and design flaws. The game can be summarized as The Sinking City poorly reskinned into a Sherlock Holmes game, which doesn't work well in my opinion, even if I did enjoy Sinking. Sherlock Holmes cases should revolve around pure facts and tight deductions, which doesn't jive with the questionable link to reality that characterized the atmospheric horror and underlying narrative design philosophy of Sinking. In Sinking, the player character can murder NPC characters based on nothing more than his (pervasive) delusions; I'm not looking for choose your own outcome using inconclusive evidence or gut feelings as impetus for accusation in a Sherlock Holmes game.

 

[Zombra]

Continuing to play, I'm past the initial "Will this be good?" stage and very much enjoying it all. Although there are many things I can imagine being done differently, what is actually here is done well and flaws are few and minor. Make sure to turn off everything in the UI and then turn bits and pieces back on if you find you can't play without them.

bertram_tung Completely agree that interaction icons are a must. The environments have way too much (decorative only) detail and trying to find relevant items by sheer guesswork would be a very dumb way to play the game.

 

[Zombra]

The new chemical analysis minigame on high difficulty is no joke!

Sadly, as the game progresses I have been given more tools and modifiers to solve these puzzles, making them much easier. decline

Unrelated to the science minigame, what really surprises me is how much I have come to appreciate the character of Jon. I thought he would be a rough and tumble young stud, there as a sounding board to amplify Sherlock's youthful cool, and then get killed off so Holmes could shake his fist and yell, "MendozaaaAAAAA!" but he turned out to be almost the complete opposite of that sort of role. I've been quite drawn in to the story that could only be told this way with two characters like this.

 

[Strig]

Strig may be glad to learn that alternate outfits are available very early in the game. I was able to cover up the Twilight haircut and retire the shiny silk suit very quickly and gear Sherlock up into the subdued, earth-toned nerd he should be:

Sure, it's better, but I'm slightly miffed with the developers' attitude more than anything else. I'm pretty sure you put the "problem glasses" on the character on purpose just to annoy me, but it's the same problem as with most of these outfits. Victorian era eyewear was sometimes pretty out there in terms of design, but these are not really period appropriate, or at least I haven't seen anything even remotely similar. And I'm not that opposed to wacky optional attire, however, the default should be if not realistic then at least believable. It's not that the game will be bad because of it, but going that extra mile and not following the shitty modern design trends is what I would really appreciate.

 

[Zombra]

I'm pretty sure you put the "problem glasses" on the character on purpose just to annoy me

lol, not intended, I just like them. I see your point though.

 

[Infinitron]

https://af.gog.com/game/sherlock_holmes_chapter_one_beyond_a_joke?as=1649904300

Race to outsmart a daring opponent who targets only rich people.

This DLC includes the following items:

• 'Beyond a Joke' Quest
  
• Newcomer Outfit
  
• Widow's Outfit

The quest is activated by eavesdropping in Grand Saray. The second main quest (A Gilded Cage) must have been completed.