Schlocktober '24: Is Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened the Greatest Game of All Time?

Schlocktober '24: When spooky season comes around I start looking for (mostly) mediocre games to satisfy my urge for gore and chills. Some are horror, some are just horror influenced, most are deeply flawed and a little obscure, but as long as they've got spooks and shivers, games of all shapes and sizes can be part of Schlocktober. Games were played, or at least started in October.

What’s this? A Sherlock Holmes game? Is @bigsocratesreally treading on @imunbeatable80’s turf like that? Would he really play a detective investigation adventure game for Schlocktober?

Elementary, my dear @imunbeatable80, he would and he did! And now we shall deduce whether it is, in fact, THE GREATEST GAME!

Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened is a Frogwares joint. This is a partially Ukrainian based studio, and the 2023 version of The Awakened, which is the one I played, was a remake of one of their previous games, made in part as a way to get a project of relatively limited scope out and on the market in the midst of the Russian invasion. It’s important to note that because The Awakened has a few technical flaws and oddities, such as cut scenes that don’t seem quite finished or graphical elements that aren’t fully up to modern standards, which I mostly ignored in part because I understand just how difficult this project must have been to complete. That’s not to say that it’s a technical mess or anything like that, it’s just a little bit rough around the edges with a tiny bit of jank. They also added some DLC side quests, which I did get but didn’t really spend time on because they weren’t very engaging, probably because there weren’t enough resources to devote to them. I just want to note all this up front as context for the rest of what I have to say.

Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened is an adventure game in Frogwares’ Sherlock Holmes series (sort of a direct sequel to Sherlock Homes Chapter One, though you don’t really need to play that to know what’s going on if you’re familiar with the characters) that combines the famous British detective with the Chtulu mythos of H.P. Lovecraft. Holmes and Watson start out investigating a servant missing from a London household and soon find themselves pulled into a mystery that has them traveling to Switzerland, Louisiana, and beyond in pursuit of a strange cult that seems to be kidnapping a lot of people for very unsavory purposes. Meanwhile Holmes himself is being pulled into madness, his already unstable mental state being sorely tested by the things he sees and hears during the adventure, and perhaps by supernatural forces as well.

As a game there isn’t much to Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened. You walk around some fairly expansive, at least for an adventure game, 3D environments and interact with objects and people. Holmes can examine various areas, such as looking at the items on a desk, and even has a special insight view mode where he can look at evidence and draw deductions or reconstruct what previously happened at a location. You can also draw deductions with a weird mind node mechanic where you combine 2-4 pieces of evidence (though you can’t fail this because incorrect choices just get excluded), do research with documents in your possession and have a few other mechanics like interrogations and the ability to observe certain people and learn things from elements like their clothes or bruising on their skin.

But while that’s a decent list of things to do there’s no fail state for most of it, so it all amounts to walking around interacting with everything until the story advances. Sometimes you can figure out what to do and sometimes you literally just have to meander about until you find the right interaction. At times it’s kind of entertaining as you deduce things and figure out to do, at times it’s maddening as the game wants you to do very specific things it doesn’t explain well. At one point you need to find a key in an animal nest, which I figured out pretty easily, but before you can interact with the nest you need to find a book about the animal and then “research” it in your inventory and it took me way too long to figure that part out, which was extremely frustrating because I knew where the key was I just couldn’t take it.

Limited gameplay means that the game has to lean more on its storytelling and environments, and there it’s a bit of a mixed bag. The environments look good, the dialog is well written, and the voice performances are decent, but character models range from adequate to not very good and the overall storyline doesn’t come together particularly well. Characters enter and leave the narrative at seemingly random times, subplots are dropped without any resolution, and the whole thing feels kind of slapped together, with inconsistent tone and strange underreactions from Holmes and Watson as the gore and supernatural elements escalate. At times I asked myself if this was actually a horror game, and it definitely is, but it’s not so much a slow burn as a sputtering one, where rather than escalating the stakes consistently the game just inserts scenes of horror and mayhem into a standard Sherlock Holmes narrative.

The end sequence is particularly annoying because it features one of the few actual puzzles in the game, which isn’t hard but is time consuming, and requires moving between several areas and completing an intensely boring QTE every time you do so. It looks weird, it’s not at all fun, and it feels like the developers were completely out of time, exhausted, and throwing something together. As I said at the outset I sympathize with them and their situation, but that doesn’t make this sequence any less annoying or deflating.

Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened is not an awful game. It has its moments and if you are in the mood for a simple supernatural adventure game with some horror elements and familiar characters you could do worse. But it does not fulfil the promise of Sherlock Holmes meets HP Lovecraft’s mythos, and as a detective game it’s too easy and straightforward. Nothing you do matters, it never makes you feel smart for solving a puzzle, and too often you are left trying to figure out what the designers want from you. I didn’t love it and I didn’t hate it. In the end it was just kind of something to play. Easy platinum though!

Is this the greatest game of all time?: No

Where does it rank:

It’s below Billy Hatcher at #1 and Super Matio 3D World + Bowser’s Fury at #2 but above Balan Wonderworld at #4 so it is the 3^rd Greatest Game of All Time.

Schlocktober Rating: Disappointing schlock. This really is kind of a schlocky game. It’s the video game equivalent of a TV movie (do they still have those?) with a washed up star and low special effects budget. The people involved are professionals but they feel like they’d rather be doing something else, and it shows. It’s not an awful experience but it’s not worth seeking out unless you’re a real fan. If it were a candy it would be some obscure promotional store brand item.