Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened — a Tradition of Investigating, Detecting and Deducting
The latest entry into the ongoing series of Sherlock Holmes games by Ukrainian developer Frogwares is a remake of their 2007 game of the same name. Its story takes players through several diverse locations —both real and surreal. While the narrative, presentation, and atmosphere all deserve to be mentioned, and could well be the subjects of their own respective articles, the point of this one is to look at the mechanics that earned this “detective game” its label.
After releasing ‘Sherlock Holmes: Crimes & Punishments’ in 2014, the developers decided to go for a soft reboot of the series, resulting in their next title; 2016's ‘Sherlock Holmes: The Devil’s Daughter’. The gameplay overall stayed the same, a 3rd person detective game, but the voice actors for Holmes and Watson, as well as their visuals, were changed.
Then, in 2019, Frogwares released ‘The Sinking City’, yet another detective game, but one independent of Arthur Conan Doyle’s creations. ‘The Sinking City’ bears some resemblance to ‘Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened’ in that it heavily draws from H.P. Lovecraft’s writings for inspiration.
For the remainder of this article, I will focus on ‘The Sinking City’, ‘Sherlock Holmes: Chapter One’ and ‘Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened’, as I find the…
