However, the solutions to these puzzles are either painfully obvious – typically following audible drones to locate floor panel switches and the like – or unintentionally hilarious, at times requiring you to repeatedly throw Sherlock off ledges or into spikey traps like he’s Bill Murray desperately trying to escape the cycle of Groundhog Day. Instead of breaking up the casework with combat, The Awakened occasionally drags Sherlock into a craggy, Lovecraftian otherworld and forces you to complete a series of environmental puzzles in order to return him to reality. That seems more appropriate for the character. On the plus side, the ill-conceived combat sections of Chapter One were apparently tossed overboard on the ship ride home from Cordona, keeping the emphasis on the brainpower of Sherlock rather than the firepower of his flintlock. Casework that feels somewhat superficial compared to that of the previous game. It all results in casework that feels somewhat superficial compared to that of the previous game, and in spite of its multiple locations, it’s considerably smaller in scope, too. This isn’t the only area that the system has been streamlined, either: Chapter One’s disguise system is ignored for the most part, and its archive research is now confined to paging through the pause menu rather than actually visiting a local newspaper office. That means it can be tempting to just brute-force your way through to the right conclusion, seeing as the only potential penalty for making mistakes along the way is fewer rewards unlocked in the bonus character art menu. Whereas in Chapter One it’s possible to accidentally send innocent people to jail if you aren’t methodical enough in your casework, in The Awakened there’s only ever one possible perpetrator to accuse. Not only are the crimes less imaginative, but there’s also very little risk of failure in solving them this time around. Whereas the previous adventure had Sherlock investigating evidence of vampires in a graveyard and determining the whereabouts of an escaped elephant, The Awakened sticks mostly to more generic kidnappings and murder, and is all the more forgettable for it. While it can still be rewarding to piece it all together, there’s no question that the cases in The Awakened are far more straightforward than they were in Chapter One. CSI: Old Blightyįor the most part, Sherlock’s crime scene investigations are conducted in much the same manner as they are in Chapter One: Presented with the often-grisly aftermath of some wrongdoing, you must first pixel-hunt your away around the scene to gather evidence like bloodstains and footprints, interview potential witnesses or known acquaintances of the victim, and then determine the sequence of events by shuffling through possible scenarios and the order in which they took place via a visual representation of Sherlock’s imagination. So the only real mystery surrounding it was trying to determine why it was included at all.

In fact, it wasn’t until I had reached the final hours of the journey that I finally managed to stumble into a side case in London involving a dead spy, but it was jarringly snuffed out by Mycroft Holmes before it could develop into anything of substance. The bulk of these settings present a substantial space to explore, but there’s almost no incentive to do so since I found little of consequence to uncover off the main story path. Unlike Chapter One, which populates its open-world island setting with a variety of cases and side stories to uncover, The Awakened is a far more linear affair that sends Holmes and Watson globe-trotting from the streets of London to an asylum in the Swiss Alps to the swampland of New Orleans and back again. The extremely loose lip syncing makes it seem like each character is delivering their lines directly into the hot end of a hair dryer.

Ign review sherlock holmes