Frogwares' Sherlock Holmes games

[Zombra]

Sherlock vs Jack the Ripper is well worth buying.

I'VE BEEN ROBBED. Very first thing in the game is an asshole fedex quest with at least 6 extra "go do this first"s.

Holmes: I want to access police records.

Spoiler

Desk sergeant: You can access the records if you find my lost briefcase.

Spoiler

Local building manager: I saw some kids steal the briefcase, you'll never find it, but I will if you'll have the police arrest the vagrant scaring my tenants.

Spoiler

Desk sergeant: I can't just arrest him, find a new home for him, go talk to his niece.

Spoiler

Niece: I don't know where he is.

Spoiler

Holmes: I bet my urchin friends can find him.

Spoiler

Urchin: he's down there.

Spoiler

Watson: The man is dying, go find him some medicine.

Spoiler

Holmes: Next I bet this guy's going to tell me to find his pet cockroach.
(Seriously, Holmes makes a joke about how stupid these nested quests are.)

Spoiler

Zombra:

 

[Zombra]

Sherlock vs Jack the Ripper is well worth buying.

I'VE BEEN ROBBED. Very first thing in the game is an asshole fedex quest with at least 6 extra "go do this first"s.

For anyone who cares, I was still hooked enough to go on and complete the game. There's a good deal of gamey annoyance, but a lot of fun puzzles (with some crap ones mixed in to be sure) and it is satisfying to put everything together and finally catch the murderer.

 

[Zombra]

In my opinion C&P was their best game because it nailed both the characters and the Victorian era perfectly and the episodic nature was very fitting to the Strand Magazine short stories. I really enjoyed that one and don't understand why they left this road so quickly.

For whatever reason, Frogwares switched to a shovelware publisher for Devil's Daughter and lost a ton of creative control. One can see many obvious changes made by profit-driven execs to sell to the lowest common denominator: let's make Holmes young, handsome, and friendly; let's have the bad guys kidnap his daughter, that story always sells; let's add jumping puzzles and 1,001 minigames so there's something for everyone ... ugh. After DD was rightly slammed for this in reviews, Bigben Nacon allowed Frogwares to make a (in my opinion) much better game with Sinking City. Now Frogwares is going to self-publish for Chapter One, so they'll have 100% creative control, which is great. I just hope they can do the math, manage the project well, and whatever else it is that publishers normally take care of.

 

[Something Else]

I'm playing Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened and it's pretty nice. I didn't know how much I wanted this before playing it. I picked it up after watching the old TV series from 1984 with Jeremy Brett starring as Holmes and being a huge fan of Lovecraft I couldn't resist it. I do have a huge issue with the game and it's something that is making me a bit angry. There's barely any ambient sounds in it. I know they were on a tight budget with this one, that they are an Ukranian dev and all that, but if a couple of guys could do sound porn with Amnesia and Penumbra then they should have at least managed to put some cheap stock ambience in there. What I like about the story so far is that it's very understated and not too in your face with the Lovecraftian aspects, which is far too common when anyone uses his material. It's always squids here, cults there, and just an exaggerated mockery of the dreamy horrors that Lovecraft actually wrote. I'm unsure of what to think about Shadows Over Baker Street anthology and such things, but I like what they are doing in this game.

Makes me wish we could get a game featuring Thomas Carnacki, the mystery and detective parts lend themselves very well with occultism and other fascinations of the period. It lets you cover more ground than the usual murder/theft mystery plots.

 

[Deleted member 28561]

The new Sherlock Holmes game let the player disguise and pretend to be others. Did not find thread on game so posting here.