Could there be a more perfect confluence of franchises than that of Arthur Conan Doyle’s legendary detective Sherlock Holmes and that of H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos? One, a man whose belief in logic trumps all and another, a world in which logic is merely a façade from the mind-numbing horror that the universe truly is.
Back in 2007, developer Frogwares mashed up these two universes in an investigative 3D point-and-click adventure that saw Holmes travelling across the globe. Now, some sixteen years later, Frogwares is returning to this game with a full-blown remake that, yet again, sees Holmes in a globe-trotting adventure to solve a very dark and inhuman mystery. The story may remain the same, but almost everything else has been changed, making this a new adventure for both newcomers and veterans alike.
The story begins with a much younger version of Holmes taking on his first important case. The beginning is rather prosaic as Holmes mistakes a case of a missing newspaper for a murder plot, giving us a view of younger and not entirely flawless in his deductions detective. His loyal partner, Watson, in a bid to keep Holmes occupied, hands him the case of a missing servant of one of his patients. What starts off simply, pulls Holmes and Watson into a case that will put them up against the worst of man’s inhumanity to man, while also pushing Holmes’s brilliant but damaged mind to near breaking point. Is the cult that worships and seeks to bring about the return of an Elder God the true nature of the world? Or will logic and reason prevail in the face of darkness?
Despite being a fully 3D game, crafted in Unreal Engine and using much of the game design that Frogwares has perfected over the years with their other Sherlock Holmes games, The Awakened is still, at its heart, very much a point-and-click adventure. The emphasis here is on a cinematic narrative adventure with a healthy dose of exploration and puzzle-solving.
Holmes and Watson’s relationship takes centre stage here. We’re given a fresh insight into how their relationship develops over the course of the game to become the Holmes and Watson that we all know from either Doyle’s own stories or their various adaptations. The game’s quieter moments are steeped in personal revelations, whether it’s Watson’s time in Afghanistan or Holmes’s relationship with his mother and his belief in reason and logic.
While these quieter, more revelatory moments are truly exceptional, the rest of The Awakened’s story is just as wonderfully told and written, from the big revelations that power the case to the smaller ones in the various mini-cases you can pick up in each area. While there are moments of levity, The Awakened is awash in despair and grittiness, with even the smallest cases providing cathartic though grim emotional moments that make the solving of these cases all the more enjoyable.
The Awakened throws Holmes into a world trotting adventure to exotic locales, but even these areas keep a constant thematic tone. Whether it’s the foggy streets of London or the bright locales of the Bayou, that grim, menacing tone of the story is mirrored in the game’s visuals. London is as dreary and depressing as can be while the mucky swamps of the Bayou, even during the day, are awash in light and noise in a way that sells the “something is not quite right here” feeling. That there is an unpleasant undertow to the world, one just looking to break through the surface, is always evident.
Less successful are the game’s character models which look a little bit last-gen and suffer from lip-synching that doesn’t match up to the vocal performance. There are also repeating NPC models across locations that suffer from lower polygon density compared to the game’s main cast. While the game does look good overall, especially if you’re playing it on current-gen systems, there are a variety of visual bugs such as texture and model pop-in and slowdown and frame drops on older-gen machines. Coupled with a strange camera bug that has the camera providing odd, distant views in an outdoor location before zipping back behind the character and some awkward character animations, The Awakened does feel like it could have done with a bit more polish.
It is important to note that Frogwares developed this game in about a year and during a war, making the fact that it’s out so soon, or at all, rather amazing.
All of your time here will be taken up with exploration and puzzle-solving. Each of the areas of the game function as a semi-open hub with smaller locations for you to explore. And each location functions as an exploration zone in which you have to put all of your skills and the mechanics of the game to use. Clues are littered across each location and successfully solving a case requires you to find every clue in an area.
At times you’ll have to pin a piece of evidence to your notebook which will let you look for a special clue whose prompt may not show up otherwise or question the various roaming NPCs whom you can’t really speak to otherwise. Once a zone has been completed you can use Sherlock’s imagination to reconstruct the crime scene, much like Batman’s detective vision, with each point in the crime scene having multiple iterations for you to pick the correct sequence of events through. It plays out somewhat like a diorama that you can walk around in, adjusting the path of events based on the evidence you’ve discovered. Once that’s done you can validate your choice to see if your deductions and the flow of the crime are correct.
Enough evidence allows you to progress the plot through Holmes Mind Palace in which you have to mix the correct pieces of evidence together. Nothing is superfluous or obtuse in The Awakened though and everything is logically laid out so that if you have been paying attention to the clues and the dialogue you won’t really get stuck unless you haven’t discovered every piece of evidence in an area or are really just bad at linking things together logically. Holmes can also profile characters by paying attention to their physical state. This is one of the more enjoyable activities in the Sherlock Holmes games though I found it wasn’t used as much here as it could have been.
At points in the game, you’ll find Holmes transported to an otherworld in which the puzzles become mechanical and spatial. Here too it’s about paying attention to your surroundings to make it through. These moments were a nice change of pace, prompting the question of how much of what Holmes was seen was real versus a decline in his mental faculties.
Frogwares have, as with their previous Holmes games and The Sinking City, adopted a no hands holding approach. The developers want you to do the detective work yourself and real detectives don’t get any hints. That said, I did find that The Awakened took some liberties with this to push the narrative forward. Where in Crimes and Punishments you could come to the wrong conclusion and convict the wrong person, there’s no drawback here for coming to the wrong conclusion. When confronting someone with a chain of evidence, if you pick the wrong choices the game just resets the conversation and if you put the wrong pieces of evidence together in the Mind Palace, the incorrect ones simply get removed from the board until all that’s left are the right choices.
Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened is at its best when it’s letting you do what Sherlock Holmes does best: being a detective. Investigating the environments, piecing together clues and solving every puzzle put in your way is absolutely enthralling. Even the game’s jankier aspects in terms of performance and visuals can’t bring down the solid voice acting, stellar narrative and arresting gameplay. Whether you’ve played the original, are new to the series or any of the Sherlock Holmes games, Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened is a great remake that will have you glued to the screen until the late hours.
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A code for this game was provided to us by the publisher for us to review.
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