The First 5 Hours: The Testament of Sherlock Holmes
Heya folks, Shaun here, and I’m back with my latest first impressions article! In this one, I’m covering an indie game called The Testament of Sherlock Holmes by Frogwares. I purchased the game a super long time ago on Steam, and since I’ve finally started playing through it, I wanted to feature it in an article.
So, you may have noticed the 5 in the title, instead of the 2. I’ve decided to switch the minimum time I put into each first impressions article from 2h to 5h. I realized that it was way too easy to hit the 2h mark, which wound up creating a metric buttload of work for me. So I decided to give myself more time with each game to lessen the amount of work I have to do, and to give me more stuff to talk about in each review.
That brings us to The Testament of Sherlock Holmes, which wound up being both the last of the classic Sherlock Holmes titles, and the beginning of the modern Sherlock Holmes titles. It released in 2012, and despite being 12 years old now, it still looks quite good, but you can definitely see its age.
The Testament of Sherlock Holmes follows our titular hero Sherlock Holmes and his faithful companion Watson investigating what was their most gruesome case up to that point. The game begins with Holmes and Watson finishing a case involving a stolen necklace but it quickly becomes much more thrilling when they discover that a Bishop had been brutally murdered. Determined to find the killers and bring them to justice, Sherlock begins investigating immediately. The case is also surprisingly lengthy and has many twists and turns along the way. At the 5h mark, I’ve been to multiple locations searching for clues, interrogating suspects, and putting together deductions on the current events at hand.
The Sherlock Holmes in this game also has a pretty shaky moral compass, and while he’s defintely no saint in the books, he is much more bold and brash in this game. There was one moment where he was going to shoot and kill an unwitting suspect until Watson stopped him right as he fired off the shot. He also committed some other questionable acts along the way as well.
Gameplay wise, the game can be played in one of three camera angles. Third Person, first person, and isometric. I personally play in third person since I find it more fun. When using a controller, you can only use the third person and first person camera views. The isometric camera view is limited to only the mouse and keyboard controls.
Admittedly, none of the camera angles are perfect, and they each have their own positives and negatives. My biggest gripe regarding the third person controls is that it utilizes a tank controls kind of setup where it takes a second or two to turn and continue moving forward. If you try to move too quickly, the controls get locked in place and you will keep moving continuously and it’s a serious pain in the buttocks to reorient yourself. There are also times when the controls will glitch a bit and it’ll move you backwards instead of forward for a second but it’ll reorient shortly after.
I’ll also mention that the controller controls are incredibly loose and touchy, and much like the keyboard and mouse controls, the tank controls work against your movement with a controller. It often locks itself in the walk position, and it takes a second to reorient itself. The camera is equally loose and moves way too quickly. I had to turn the camera sensitivity to 1 on the slider because it was way too fast.
Much of the gameplay is spent exploring different locations and interacting with objects of interest, conversing with people for information, and solving puzzles. Each area hosts a ton of interaction points for you to interact with, and Sherlock, or Watson (Depending on who you’re currently controlling) will comment on the object and will give you some information regarding it. It’s a good idea to pay attention to the dialogue as well, because you’ll need the information to solve the deduction board for each case.
Once you’ve investigated an entire location, you’ll sometimes need to deduce what happened at a crime scene. This is done on the deduction board where you’ll place the information that you’ve learned into informational bubbles to figure out the entirety of what happened. If your deductions are correct, they’ll turn green.
The game’s puzzles are unsurprisingly pretty challenging to figure out, as one would expect from a game themed around Sherlock Holmes, but some are easier to figure out than others. They do require you to look carefully and thoroughly, however. The game also features a skip puzzle option if you take too long to figure the puzzle out, which is nice of the developers. There’s also a sixth sense option that offers you hints as to objects that you can interact with, which is also nice because some objects can be a bit easy to miss.
In the end, despite the game’s shortcomings, and wonky controls, I think the overall story to the game is pretty great, and one of the darker Sherlock Holmes stories I’ve experiened. There’s also references to Sherlock’s adventures in the games prior to this one, which I think is pretty cool. It’s a little rough around the edges, but enjoyable if you can get past its shortcomings. I’ll give this one a 7 out of 10.
