The perfect Sherlock Holmes adventure: does such a thing exist? Can we ever feel completely immersed in the Baker Street detective’s puzzle-solving prowess? Developer Frogwares has been working on this conundrum for the past decade, offering near-solutions like Sherlock Holmes: Secret of the Silver Earring, Sherlock Holmes vs. Arsène Lupin, and last year’s exceptional The Testament of Sherlock Holmes. The upcoming Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments may be the closest they’ve come to solving the riddle of the Sherlock game.
The perfect Sherlock Holmes adventure: does such a thing exist? Can we ever feel completely immersed in the Baker Street detective’s puzzle-solving prowess? Developer Frogwares has been working on this conundrum for the past decade, offering near-solutions like Sherlock Holmes: Secret of the Silver Earring, Sherlock Holmes vs. Arsène Lupin, and last year’s exceptional The Testament of Sherlock Holmes. The upcoming Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments may be the closest they’ve come to solving the riddle of the Sherlock game.
Over the course of their Holmes exploration, Frogwares has transported the detective from straightforward point-and-click adventures with little need for anything resembling detective work to an L.A. Noire-esque adventure that placed heavy—and welcome—emphasis on collecting clues and using logic to deduce their connection to the case, in The Testament of Sherlock Holmes. Crimes and Punishments will follow in the footsteps of this most recent predecessor, featuring eight different cases revolving around murders, disappearances, thefts, and other crimes that will require not just inventory management, but actual sleuthing.
With each case written in the style of the classic Sir Arthur Conan Doyle novels, players—in the (gum)shoes of Holmes—will be presented with not just uncovering a straightforward solution, but actual moral decisions that must be considered along the way. These choices will affect your in-game reputation and create potentially unexpected consequences throughout the adventure, requiring players to think about a case with not just logic, but emotion as well.
Along with an enhanced emotional attachment, players may find themselves drawn into Holmes’ new cases even more thanks to its updated graphics. For the first time in their long history with Sherlock, Frogwares is using the Unreal Engine 3 to present the detective in the greatest detail to date. Along with a more modern makeover for the somewhat ill-fashioned detective, Crimes and Punishments is poised to truly move Sherlock into present day gaming.
No official release date is available yet, but we’ll have more details when Crimes and Punishments hits PC and consoles later this year.
