Review for Sherlock Holmes: Chapter One
Frogwares has returned to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famed detective with their latest third-person 3D mystery Sherlock Holmes: Chapter One, but this time with a twist. Something of an origin story, many liberties are taken with the character here. Still in his early twenties, he’s already an observant detective, though he tends to bend facts to fit emotions and theories rather than the other way around. With an entire island of mysteries to investigate, he’ll have plenty of opportunity to hone skills such as the art of disguise, connecting details in a person’s appearance, eavesdropping to pick up new cases, researching historical archives, following subtle signs of a suspect’s trail, conducting chemical analyses, and even (optionally) engaging in some gunfights with the criminal element when need arises. It’s an impressive array of abilities that makes the game feel like both the culmination of and worthy successor to Frogwares’ previous works.
Leaving behind his usual London surroundings, Sherlock has returned to his childhood home on the Mediterranean island of Cordona to at last pay his respects to his long-deceased mother. Of course, wherever Sherlock goes, mysteries can’t be far behind, and he soon suspects that there was more to his schizophrenic mother’s death than natural causes. And so, armed only with his wits and a few scant clues at first, young Sherlock strives to remove the mental blocks within his own psyche to discover the truth of what happened in his past.
Regardless of age, no Holmes adventure would be complete without a long-suffering sidekick before whom Sherlock can look amazing by contrast. Here that role is filled by Sherlock himself – or rather, the dissociative break of his own mind that is Jon, his imaginary childhood friend who still travels with him and challenges him to be a better person. Jon calls Sherlock “Sherry,” which I felt appropriate as other than his great intellect, there was little I found recognizable in this realization of the literary character.
In the books and short stories, Sherlock would often annoy people by revealing hidden truths, but it was never done maliciously. Here, however, Sherry is rude and exhibits almost gleeful delight in insulting people when first arriving on the island, particularly Verner Vogel, a resident artist who challenges Sherry’s notions about objective truth. Jon’s humanizing influences and admonishment of Sherry’s behavior does mellow him as the game progresses, though he remains aloof and makes no apology for it.
Early on Sherry checks in at a local hotel, where he is given the prescient room 221 on the second floor. His talents are immediately needed as a priceless gem is stolen during a séance. As with Frogwares’ other recent Sherlock Holmes games, players must collect evidence to form a mind map of the events that occurred. Presented as a series of mental nodes connected by lines, choices must be made among these smaller discoveries to arrive at the guilty party and to make a moral choice about how severe their punishment should be.
Curiously, it’s up to you to decide what the right answer is. Whichever choice is selected becomes the correct one, so no fear of failure in that regard. However, I found this introductory case and others later on to frequently be unsatisfying because key story points remained unresolved. In one you can accuse a suspect of murder, who then confesses to everything. However, during the investigation it’s established that the murderer has an alibi provided by multiple people, and the resolution never deals with this blatant contradiction. In fact, all such cases are more easily solved by ignoring the evidence, which tends to be incomplete or contradictory, and to decide emotionally on what outcome you as the player would prefer to see.
Fortunately, Sherlock Holmes: Chapter One offers a lot of side quests to pursue as well. These lack the mind maps and choice aspect, being more traditional, linear mystery investigations consisting of following a string of clues to one final, fixed conclusion. As such, I found their resolutions less wishy-washy and more rewarding. Some cases are more bizarre than others, such as a pet elephant that may have killed its master, and a pistol dueling club that uses blanks and conducts showdowns blindfolded. Others are more serious, like a multiple homicide in a bar, and the rape of an African woman now residing in a refugee ghetto.
Additional activities abound too, like a treasure hunt that provides an excuse to explore Cordona’s sights, eavesdropping on residents for leads on new cases, and finding bandit hideouts to deliver some Victorian vigilantism. Chief among these pursuits is restoring the former glory of Sherry’s childhood home, which has fallen into disarray from years of neglect. Immediately after his mother died, Sherry’s brother Mycroft sold the estate furnishings before he and Sherry returned to their original home in London. As you progress, shop vendors become accessible around the island, each of whom has new pieces from the household collection. Sherry starts the game with a meagre supply of funds that can be supplemented by completing cases, and any pieces bought will both decorate the corridors of the manor and unlock more of Sherry’s memories of the past.
The city consists of five districts. Scaladio is at its heart and contains municipal buildings like the town hall and police station. Multi-story brownstones rise from the streets, British flags flap in the wind, and the people who walk the laneways wear London’s finest. South of this is Grand Saray, which hosts Sherry’s family residence, and the local yacht club along its seafront property. High society British influences are on display, with stately manors interspersed among the craggy rocks of the landscape. To the east is the walled Old City, with its rough and weathered brickwork, dusty aisles, and open-air markets built from rough timbers and bleached, tattered cloth awnings. Home to the city’s Kurd, Turk, and Crimean populations, the people there aren’t eager to help Sherry. To the North is Silverton, the industrial area where warehouses, the commercial docks, and the red-light district lay. Here is the true melting pot of Cordona where you can run into people from almost any nationality, some friendly, some not. Finally, there’s Miner’s End in the west, where the city’s destitute live. Something of a shanty town, the residents keep to themselves and are suspicious of strangers.
The districts possess their own soundscapes, making them seem all the more real. Wind howls through the streets of the Old City, while the crash of surf is never far from the docks of Silverton and Grand Saray. Street musicians in the different regions play a variety of instruments suited to their backdrops. Then there’s the game’s own score, which is more prominently featured during investigations and less so while wandering the island. Including the likes of strings, brass, and woodwinds, the musical accompaniment is appropriately mysterious when scouring crime scenes, tense when engaged in combat, and emotional when necessary for drama.
Together the five districts comprise a large open world to traverse. Impressively, there are no loading zones and Sherry can run from one side of the city to the other seamlessly. Finding key locations unlocks fast-travel points, which can be teleported to using the map Sherry keeps in his journal. Players can also add waypoints to the map for destinations not near one of these teleportation points, which offer directional guidance on an optional compass at the top of the screen. These provide a general bearing to follow, but the avenues of Cordona are so twisty that I found myself constantly toggling the map to stay on course instead. I would have preferred an on-screen mini-map to help me find my way – or even just street signs! All of the streets are named on the map, often with names inspired by the original Sherlock Holmes stories like Adler Street or Reichenbach Road, but no such signage is visible in the world itself.
Navigation isn’t alone in being awkward; every interface element feels slightly more cumbersome than it should. For instance, at times you need to ask passersby about a particular fact in a case. To do so requires entering the journal, where all the cases are listed in a quest log. Each case has its own page of generic icons representing clues. One of these can be “pinned” with a button press. Upon leaving the journal, the pinned clue is displayed in the top right of the screen and anyone Sherry interacts with afterwards will be asked about it. The concept is sound, but given that some cases have dozens of clues, it can be tricky and tedious to find the right one, even with small pin-shaped icons displayed above them. Additional icons crowd out the pins so it’s hard to tell at a glance which ones can be used.
The game’s combat system also feels overcooked, although there are options to make it easier or skip it entirely and continue as if you just won the fight. If you do partake in violence, you will fight several waves of two to four enemies in arenas specifically set up with strategic options. Such areas have a large central obstruction, like a stack of crates, and several smaller pieces of cover scattered about. When Sherry enters an arena, he gets a few moments to take in his surroundings. He can outright shoot and kill opponents, which sacrifices funds for buying furniture or costumes and earns Jon’s ire. Or he can subdue them, which involves running around the central obstacle, waiting for the right time to strike. It’s possible for Sherry to die during a fight, which results in the game reloading an autosave immediately beforehand, requiring you to play through the whole sequence again.
During an altercation, most enemies wear makeshift armor pieces or other items that have to be shot before they are defenseless enough to knock unconscious. Enemies with hats are the easiest, as shooting these off immediately discombobulates them so that Sherry can get close and initiate a Quick Time Event. Here you must move a mouse or gamepad thumbstick in a particular direction shown on-screen, then press a keyboard key or button matching that direction to knock out your foe. Failing to execute this sequence causes them to regain their senses and wail away on Sherry.
I found it most frustrating fighting those wearing full helmets. Despite appearing to be reasonably large targets, they can only be removed by shooting the immediate area around the person’s eyes. Going for the forehead results in an unintended instant kill instead; it took nearly a dozen retries in one confrontation for me to figure out the glitch. You can proceed with killing one or more antagonists in combat, but I resented being blamed for deaths when I clearly tried to avoid it. I preferred using the mouse and keyboard combination, which I found more fluid than the gamepad. That said, a controller offers assistance by snapping the gunsights to a particular target when aiming in roughly the right direction, although you have to wait a moment or two for it to kick in.
If a combatant doesn’t have a hat or helmet, then Sherry must either blow a puff of snuff from his snuff box in their face or else shoot some environmental object to disorient them instead before attempting the Quick Time series. Given that the environmental objects, like flour bags or oil-filled lamps, are all small targets, it’s hard to hit them accurately in real time, especially with Sherry’s lumbering movements. Fortunately, holding a particular button slows the action to a crawl and any shootable bits start to glow. Even so, it’s still a challenge to hit targets before time speeds up again.
Another issue is that while combat should be strategic, it’s difficult in practice – because adversaries either dog your heels or else stand in one place – to lure them close to an environmental object, turn, spot the object, slow down time, and shoot at the right moment to affect them. Especially as your foe’s liable to shoot you before you can do so, ruining your aim. Mostly I ran in a circle waiting for the snuff box to slowwwly charge so it could be used in Sherry’s immediate vicinity. The result was that fighting became repetitive and boring.
Fortunately there’s no shortage of other engaging gameplay mechanics outside of battle. Sherry can trigger environmental hotspots to get a general remark or provide an opportunity for closer inspection. These close-up views switch to a first-person mode in which the camera can be moved around a little. Here you will have to find all hotspots, as indicated by a visible counter, by moving a targeting reticle around the screen until it lights up. Once you’ve located them all, Sherry will make some kind of deduction based on them.
As with talking to passersby, some hotspots require evidence to be pinned before becoming active. Wavering white circles then appear on-screen that Sherry can concentrate more intently on. Sometimes these lead to crime scene re-creations, where Jon takes over and walks around a monochrome version of the scene. In this view, Jon can interact with mental images of suspects to toggle between different actions or different people doing the same action. For example, he may need to choose between two suspects wielding a weapon in a fight. The chosen configuration of all these mental images is then submitted to see if it’s correct. If it is, Sherry will describe the full sequence of events; if not, Jon will admonish Sherry for not focusing and further adjustments will be needed.
Sometimes instead of entering crime scene re-creations, the game allows Sherry to concentrate more intently in a scene, which causes the path a departing suspect took to appear. This is visualized as two glowing walls that fade in and out over a muted version of the scene. Sherry has to remain between these two intangible thought walls to follow the tracks to their destination.
Occasionally you can conduct chemical analyses on mysterious substances you find. Here you are given a target composition consisting of numerical values of red, green, and blue reagents that you have to match. You do so by creating of graph of reagents connected by mathematical operations, such as increasing an amount by one, negating an amount, or doubling an amount. Once your math adds up to the target values, you submit your answer by tapping a button in order to complete the analysis. These puzzles are randomly generated, though there are settings to control their difficulty. On the standard settings I used, none of them were overly difficult, though they did become more challenging as the game progressed and additional math operations were unlocked.
Sherry doesn’t always have the full history of the cases he accepts. To counter that, a trip to the archives at town hall, the police department, or the newspaper is needed. Here Sherry accesses information on crime patterns, housing registries, prominent citizens, and so on. These searches are conducted in close-up screens where a given clue needs to be cross-referenced with three pieces of information. If you select the correct three, such as a specific district of the city, recent news, and criminals, then Sherry will uncover the information needed. If you get them wrong, then Jon starts to complain about being bored and frustrated.
Yet another aspect of gameplay is Sherry’s frequent use of disguises. Clothing vendors around the city sell suits, hats, makeup, and moustaches. Sherry’s appearance influences how responsive people are. If he strolls into Old City in his default Victorian-punk outfit, with short coattails pinned up, sleeves rolled back, and a chain securing his billfold to his trousers, the British-resenting citizens will refuse to answer Sherry’s questions. But disguise him as an Ottoman merchant and those same people become far more helpful.
Determining the right costume for the right circumstances is a welcome layer of challenge, although it too is more cumbersome than needs be. Within Sherry’s journal is a page where costume pieces are chosen. Along the right side are half a dozen dials with icons indicating how aligned a disguise is to a particular use. Each icon is described in the game’s built-in help feature, but they’re buried several pages down and there’s plenty of screen space to have printed the names of each dial anyway. Once a costume is chosen, it’s a matter of exiting the journal, entering concentration mode, and focusing on whichever character you wish to talk to. Text observations of that character then float around them, including how friendly the person is with the selected disguise. Despite the awkwardness of the interface, I found changing costumes a particularly fun aspect of the gameplay experience.
Ultimately there’s a lot of content in Sherlock Holmes: Chapter One, and having different investigative styles kept the proceedings interesting and fresh, even after the twenty-five hours it took me to finish everything. This consisted of over thirty investigations divided between the main storyline and the side quests. And if that’s not enough, Frogwares has begun releasing downloadable content to expand Sherry and Jon’s adventures.
A game this size needs a suitably large cast, as most cases involve dealing with three to five characters each. Multiply that by the number of investigations and it becomes rather staggering, but all of them are fully voiced with no poor performances. Sherry’s portrayal in particular is quite strong, especially as he grows increasingly emotional towards the game’s end. I witnessed him weeping and felt sorrow for his discoveries about himself and his past. Any game that can provoke an emotional response is definitely doing something right.
The emotional impact is certainly helped by the game’s impressive visual presentation. Characters look more lifelike than ever in this series, displaying a high degree of realism and nuance, although occasionally cutscenes try too hard to make them lively, such that they bob around in situations where real people would display stillness and subtlety. This high graphical quality extends to the environments as well. With its bustling avenues of residents of all nationalities, array of shops, taverns, homes, and municipal buildings, and obvious historical and class differences in its architecture, Cordona looks and feels like a real place. A day/night cycle makes it even more dynamic, especially in the duskiness of evening when glowing fireflies come out to illuminate the streets.
While the main investigations in Sherlock Holmes: Chapter One feel surprisingly hollow with resolutions that don’t resolve everything, the many side quests more than make up for it. A huge cast, strong production values, an emotional tale of Sherry in his youth, a wide variety of gameplay styles, and a plethora of costumes that have real gameplay effects serve to keep things from feeling stale and overshadow the repetitive tedium of even the optional combat sequences. Significant liberties have been taken with the titular character, and I can see them sparking a debate on whether Sherry really qualifies as Sherlock Holmes or not. For myself, he doesn’t, but that doesn’t make his journey or abilities any less compelling. With much to offer and more on the way, the mystery-filled island of Cordona should be on the list of virtual vacation spots for armchair detectives and adventure fans alike.
