Crimes and Punishments is the best Sherlock Holmes game ever made.
That’s not light praise- Indie studio Frogwares has been making Sherlock Holmes games for quite a while now, as this is actually the eighth (!) title in a series that has seen Mr. Holmes facing everything from Jack the Ripper to Lovecraftian beasties.
Of course, not all of them have been great, and the producers of Frogwares themselves have even admitted that they had no idea how to make a game before they started the studio over a decade ago. It’s clear that they’ve learned on the job, though, as they have gotten better and better with each installment, leading to this, which gives you all the tools you need to feel like you're in the Victorian CSI. The idea of examining evidence and playing detective appeal to you? You will love this game.
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As Sherlock you will solve six different and varied cases, although they all generally involve a murder of some sort. (It may have been the Victorian era, but people are people, and people kill people.) In order to deduce what happened you’ll interrogate suspects, look for evidence, hunt down clues in your archives and perform science experiments in your lab. You’ll even change up your appearance a couple of times- Holmes is supposedly the master of disguise, after all.
As the first installment for next-gen systems, this is also the first in the series to abandon Frogwares’ proprietary engine and go with the Unreal Engine 3 (perhaps due to Epic’s cheap new subscription plans and deals for indie devs), which means that it’s by far the best-looking installment to date. On the PS4 it looks wonderful, employing all kinds of dynamic lighting and atmospheric effects. It's nothing that you'll use to show off the power of your new console but it more than does the job, and lets you get a nice look at character’s faces and demeanors to see if they’re telling the truth, and catch them in a lie if they’re not.
One other problem is that the six cases really feel like just that- six seperate cases. It really feels like a bunch of short stories rather than a complete game with an overarching storyline. There’s a bit of a climax to the last case but it feels shoehorned in and completely unearned. You just learned about this plot so it doesn’t have half the impact it would have if you had found out about it earlier.
That doesn’t lessen the impact of the cases before it, however. This is undoubtedly the closest anyone has ever gotten to replicating what it would be like to be a master detective, and fans of adventure games shouldn’t hesitate to dive right in. It's by far the best Sherlock Holmes game Frogwares has created and one can only hope that they continue to add new features and hone the experience for the series, as there’s no limit to the amount of Sherlock Holmes games they could create.
Getting here may have not been elementary, but the game is finally afoot.
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Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments is available for PS4, PS3, Xbox One, Xbox 360 and PC both in retail and as a digital download. This review was written based on a complete playthrough with the PS4 version from a code provided by the publisher. Not all the suspects arrested were the right ones.
