The Lost Cases of Sherlock Holmes
Review
The game's afoot!
by Marcus Mulkins
reviewed on PC
Frankly, I’m somewhat puzzled (cntd)
Usually there are several rooms or locations that need to be examined. As clues are discovered, you will be told about the suspects associated with each of those clues. After all the clues are found, the list of suspects will be categorized according to significant case elements. This in itself is set as an arrange-the-portraits-in-the-proper-order puzzle. The last task is to weed through the categorized suspects until only one remains. While you’re gathering clues and solving puzzles, a clock is counting down. The first case has an allotment of 25 minutes. (Which I cleared in 8:11, so that should tell you how difficult that first puzzle isn’t.) The toughest case, the last one, has the clock set at 35 minutes. If you run out of time, you have to start that case from scratch.
As an aid to the player, as you hunt for clues most cluttered room puzzles have a tobacco pipe hidden in plain sight. Find those and you can use them later to find an elusive clue. Click on your pipe tally, and a hidden clue will pop up into plain sight. Each case also has one deerstalker cap hidden in the clutter; find all sixteen of those and you unlock a bonus mini-game at the end.
Now, it is significant to point out that unlike a more traditional mystery game, you do not have to actually be able to determine the significance of any given clue. That would take too much brain sweat – and if you guess wrong, you’d leave the game feeling bad about yourself. Instead, you only have to find the clues, and then winnow through the suspects in a “what’s wrong with this picture?” puzzle. What is or isn’t significant will be told to you by Holmes in the summation.
So, essentially what you have is a story being told to you while you work through some not-too-difficult puzzles. That’s more thinking required than Solitaire – without being too much.
Well done! I say! Well done!
There is really very little I can fault this game for. The graphics are colorful and stable. The music is a simplistic, soothing string selection very reminiscent of the start of the Jeremy Brett TV series. The voice acting is first-rate: no one is doubling up by doing the voices of more than one character even when there are about 20 different characters with speaking roles, spread across the 16 cases. If any of the puzzles proved to be too challenging, there was always a bypass available, except in the last case.
One of the best features about the game is that no game manual is required. The interface is incredibly intuitive, and what little bit you need explained is handled by an occasional pop-up window.
If I must voice a complaint, it would be about the character animation. Think of the start of an episode of “Monty Python’s Flying Circus”. Remember the cardboard cutouts and the way they showed the cutout talking? You’ve got this 2-D cutout of a person, and as he or she talks, only the mouth and eyes move. Same thing here. However, since the “feel” of the artwork was more towards comic books than reality, I can easily forgive them for that. Also, it would have been nice to be able to quit out of a case that isn’t going well and start it over again. As it stands, in order to start over you have to either run out of time or successfully finish the case. I found this out when I finished the 16th case, but had failed to find the deerstalker cap. Now, in order to go back to find it, I have to play all the way through the 16th case, hoping I’ll spot it this time. So far, no luck on that score (but I can now knock off that case in less than 5 minutes).
However, the best thing I can say for The Lost Cases of Sherlock Holmes is that the price tag is only $19.99. Given that a trip to see a 90-minute movie, counting ticket and refreshments, will run close to $20, I count this as a better investment. As it worked out, my play through of all sixteen cases took me all of about 10 hours. And since I was at home, my snacks were much cheaper than at the theater. All in all, not a bad deal.
8.0
fun score
No Pros and Cons at this time
