The Testament of Sherlock Holmes

A bunch of freakish-looking kids find a book in the attic which recounts a murder investigated by Sherlock Holmes. I wouldn't think a tale about brutal murders is suitable for kids, and I'm also surprised that they have a reading ability sufficient to read it. It does tie into the ending but seems unnecessary why they even came up with the concept.

Sherlock is arrogant and despite him being a detective, he is quite willing to use his lack of ethics to extreme lengths, even committing crimes to solve his case. Breaking and entering, assisting in a prison break, preventing children receiving medical attention, blackmailing children, manslaughter, poisoning. He is a total psychopath.

Sherlock draws tenuous links to deduct information out of nothing, leaving you just as baffled as Doctor Watson. I think Dr Watson stays by Sherlock's side purely out of fear. Sherlock is patronising and bosses Dr Watson into doing basic tasks and intimidates him into turning a blind-eye to Sherlock's crimes.

The voice acting is generally good assuming Sherlock's deadpan tone is deliberate to add to his character. The bad side of the dialogue is that there's a noticeable gap in the speech when characters are supposed to interrupt and cut off the other person mid-sentence.

The game is a point-and-click adventure game, but you can switch between the traditional point-and-click style, or the modern WASD style movement in the perspective of first or third-person. There will be times where you will have to switch the style because some scenes are particularly clumsy to navigate in point-and-click. The action switches between Sherlock, Watson and (for one section) his Dog.

In point-and-click style, the constant changing of camera angles can make it disorienting where to go. Some of the areas are large with lots of unnecessary places, which helps convey how large the building/city is, but the game-play suffers because of it; taking longer to get where you want, and making it harder to locate points of interest. Being in control of the dog is very boring. Puzzles go out of the window, and in comes finding hotspots to progress and this drags out for far too long.

Sometimes it's unclear where to go. Sometimes it's a simple, but pointless task. Sherlock tells Watson to get a book. Where in the house is it? Well, the characters should know; it's their house. Since, you're the player, it's gonna take some time to pixel hunt. There's plenty of times like this, meaning it ends up being quite frustrating.

It turns out many of the citizens have secrets to hide, often storing their possessions in containers which require puzzles to open. The puzzles are so varied, it's often hard to understand the rules to the puzzle, never mind actually solving it. Some of these puzzles are actually really hard, but others are simple tasks, hidden behind a poor user interface. After a while, you get the option to skip the puzzle, but a hint system may have been more welcome.

The normal game-play involves picking up items (sometimes combining them) and using them elsewhere. You can press the space-bar to highlight places of interest, so you don't have to just mindlessly pixel-hunt, but this feature has a cooling down period, so you have to wait a short while to use it again.

If you are investigating a scene of a crime, the evidence you find goes on your Deduction Board. With each bit of evidence, you infer a fact from a multiple choice list. These extra bits of information are then combined to reach a conclusion to what happened at the scene. The thing is, you never have enough evidence to actually guarantee any of the facts, but Sherlock seems to think it is 100% conclusive. This means the Deduction Boards are just trial and error.

The game tries to be varied to keep things interesting, but these ideas are marred by the user interface design. The overall game design could be better, rather than a lot of the padding to increase the length. It doesn't need to be here, because the game is quite lengthy anyway. Although the game is fine from a technical point of view, I just didn't enjoy playing the game.