‘Point-and-click adventure’ is an odd term in the context of computer games because all games are to a greater or lesser extent point and click adventures. In Call of Duty, you click on the all foreigners until they are dead, in The Witcher 2¸you click on the ladies until they have sex with you, and in Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments, you click on everything on the screen until you discover all of the clues recklessly left behind by the villains because it just wouldn’t be fair on the authorities to methodically erase your tracks after painstakingly planning and executing a murder.
As the name obviously suggests but I’ll say it anyway, Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments is a game adapted from, or at least heavily inspired by, the Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle. You are Sherlock Holmes, cocaine-addled socio-path, though at times you step into the role of the moustachioed John Watson and the jowly paws of Toby, Bassett Hound and ‘finest nose in the British Empire’ as Holmes regularly reminds the player when they to interact with the dog. You play through six, self-enclosed mysteries, each with a principle crime and then several, smaller crimes uncovered as you proceed through the case. You’ll investigate vanishing trains, impossible murders, and political intrigue, and each mystery is different enough to remain interesting, which is important because due to the very nature of the episodic format the game adopts, it is possible to complete several mysteries in one play session.
In order to uncover the clues scattered throughout each episode, you are given various challenges to complete, such as picking locks or arm-wrestling burly, grizzled seaman. Each mystery has at least one or two unique puzzles or challenges which you have to complete in order to proceed. In one episode you must re-enact a murder by skewering a pig with a harpoon, and in another, you must booby-trap and abandoned house to stop potential thieves from escaping. These unique challenges keep the gameplay challenging and fresh, as what is ultimately a game in which you click on things until you run out of things to click on could become dull without some innovation. You are given the option to skip these challenges if they become too difficult, which is fine if you are just interested in finding out the solution to the puzzle, but this is a video game, not a book. This option does honour the games literary background however, so it is possible to enjoy this game as a story with interesting mysteries if, for some reason, the whole idea of ‘gameplay’ isn’t your thing.
The main problem for the game is it’s literary background, and suffers from the same level of ‘replayability’ to use a word that doesn’t exist, as you would expect from a game influence by a genre in which the whole excitement and reason for reading or playing is finding out who committed the crime. Crimes and Punishments attempts to evade this issue by not ‘failing’ you if you make an incorrect deduction when progressing toward a solution to any of the mysteries in the game. Each case can be resolved however you wish, and the game does not explicitly tell you whether you made the right decision or not. (At the end of each case you do, however, have the opportunity to press a button to see how the case actually is solved, though this is optional and the game even draws attention to this fact by pointing out that finding out the ‘true’ solution will spoil your enjoyment of the game.) Despite this, you cannot ignore the fact that you discover all of the clues in exactly the same way with each play-through. The only variety there would be to any replaying of the game is in the differing conclusions you can come to, but you don’t need to actual replay the game to do this; you can just load the episode and choose to replay the ending.
One other hangover of the literary source the game draws upon is its episodic nature. The Holmes stories were largely all self-contained and had no over-arching plot holding them all together. Moriarty as a Holmes’ long-standing nemesis only appears in one of the Holmes stories, and Holmes’ struggle against the criminal mastermind is much embellished upon in his various screen appearances. Crimes and Punishments, to its credit, does attempt to place the six episodes within the context of a grander narrative involving a terrorist group called ‘The Merry Men’, but the only real time this story is referenced is in a mini epilogue at the end of the game, which honestly feels like an after-thought and clumsily attempts to comment on the nature of justice and truth, a discussion which is conspicuously absent during the main body of the game.
Ironically, the literary source of the game is one of its strong points. Crimes and Punishments eschews the 21st century world of the recent BBC adaptations in favour of the late nineteenth century London of the original Sherlock stories, and the game embraces this time-period with incredible verve and gusto. You explore remote railway stations, Roman baths and Scotland Yard itself, and the amount of detail put into designing these environments is truly incredible, in my opinion placing the game on a par with the most graphically impressive of triple-A titles. It is evident that painstaking effort has been made on the part of the game’s developers to deliver a fully-realised environment that feels as though it leaves and breathes, and this comes through in every single frame of the game.
The detail put into the character models, is similarly astounding, and the animation that accompanies the voice-acting is excellent. You will interact with an impressively diverse range of people, from the curiously ubiquitous bearded seaman to villainous circus owners, and the old favourites from the books make a return as well. No such effort has been made into developing the characters themselves as fully-rounded people though. The suspects in each mystery are, without exception, oddly static; once the crime has been committed, they patiently wait in place to answer questions, and even more patiently wait for their ingenious plan to be uncovered as a result of a curiously cavalier attitude to disposing of incriminating evidence. Effort has been made develop some kind of arc with Holmes’s character, and at the end of each case you are given a score depending on how you have handled the case and what resolution you came to, which is a nice touch, and does effect the game’s concluding scenes, but it would have contributed greatly to the experience to have had the characters react dynamically as you uncover each individual mystery.
There are other issues: You have the option of playing the game in first or third person, but please play the game in first-person. It is a much more immersive experience, and the controls are much sharper compared to the third-person controls make Sherlock jerk around like a drunk snake. There is also no denying the fact that the game flatly refuses to take away the training wheels and allow you the possibility of actually failing to solve the case, even in the later mysteries. During conversations with the various characters in the game, you cannot choose the wrong questions to ask – if you do, the conversation restarts and you are given another chance to choose the correct option, which is odd considering the fact you cannot ‘fail’ when deciding on your own solution to each mystery as a whole.
It is always difficult ending these reviews with a conclusion that doesn’t just repeat the points I have made in the review itself but in a more reductive format. I bought the game during one of Steam’s frankly irresponsible summer sales and it is good value for the price I paid, but would I say the same thing if I had paid full price? The replay factor of the game is severely hamstrung by its literary background so I’m inclined to say no. Buy it cheap, play it once, never think of it again. Consumer advice!