Sherlock Holmes Chapter One is a fun game, but there is a lot of work for improvement.
Detective games are tricky. They need to be challenging enough to offer satisfaction and reward players for being clever for noticing minutia and connecting the dots. But, at the same time, they need to be coherent and not excessively convoluted as to make players frustrated with their lack of progress. Somehow, Sherlock Holmes Chapter One manages to be both at the same time and gives us a mediocre rendition of fiction’s best detective, yeah, suck on that, Batman. Is this game worth your while? Does it capture the essence of what a Sherlock Holmes adventure should be? Is it a competent detective game? Not really, but there is still a lot to talk about this mystery-driven game.
The premise is quite simple. You control a young version of Sherlock Holmes, who must return to his hometown after the mysterious assassination of his mother. Now there is a mystery to be solved and there are emotional and personal stakes on the line. That should be enough to carry the narrative forward but, if that were the case, Clue would be a much better board game than it is.
This is a sort of soft reboot/prequel game for the series, as many core gameplay elements of mystery-solving are still present from previous entries, but the main difference lies in the fact that the world is now open. The sheer sense of scale and the faithful recreation of era-appropriate architecture and details would resemble the likes of Assassin’s Creed.
Unfortunately, it becomes very obvious very soon that this is not that kind of game, and that the open world is more of a gimmick than an actual useful gameplay element. The world, albeit vast and beautiful, is rather empty. The lack of interactive elements accentuates just how big the map is but with no real reason for it to be that massive for a game with so limited options. For instance, the shop. In the most open-world or open environment games, shops will sell you products to aid you in your journey, to make it easier to traverse the map.
But in Sherlock Holmes Chapter One, the shop will sell you newspapers, and décor for the Holmes manor. That is it. Most elements you can interact with are merely part of the different mysteries to be solved and makes the world feel more like a Saturday morning Hannah-Barbera Cartoon in which only interactive elements are colored differently.
In terms of gameplay, let’s tackle first the game’s major sin, its combat system. Sherlock is not a gunslinger nor a merciless killer, but in Sherlock Holmes Chapter One you can be one without any real moral consequences. Yes, there is a bigger reward when you arrest and dispose of a thug with nonlethal techniques, but the reward is just more money, and as we saw earlier, it is rather pointless. It is much easier to just aim for the head each time as if thugs were mere zombies and be done with it. It is more efficient, faster, and there is no negative consequence for doing so.
Furthermore, Sherlock Holmes Chapter One gifts you a pistol with unlimited ammo so you are not even constrained by silly things like strategy and resource management. And if that wasn’t enough, the gunplay is based on bullet-time and quick-time events. There is no way you can lose a firefight if you only aim for the head. This renders entirely useless the actual interactive elements during a fight, which you can shoot to distract or stun your enemies, and killing people to progress becomes more a chore than a fun gameplay element. This is sad, as a few tweaks here and here would go a very long way into making it a competent mechanic.
Now for the fun part, the mystery solving. Mysteries are clever, well written, and well designed. They make you work for it but reward you with genuine eureka moments. The game rewards players who pay attention to details, who think critically, and who understand Sherlock’s innate talent for mystery solving. In this sense, the game does well what past entries already did well, and makes you feel like an actual Victorian detective.
But, as mentioned in the introduction of this review, the pace is sometimes haled because of the lack of coherence and feedback from the game. One could be close to making the right decision, but the game doesn’t offer enough feedback to let you know you are on the right path.
On the contrary, it limits itself to telling you that you are doing something wrong, but not what. There is nothing wrong with not wanting to hold the player’s hand, but one can meet the player halfway to offer some clarity on what you want them to do. The problem is, contrary to what one might think, the open world. Because it becomes painfully obvious that it hinders the game’s flow. There is nothing gained from opening the game boundaries and there is nothing gained those past entries didn’t have with linear and limited spaces. Furthermore, the game has a fast travel mechanic that is way more useful than roaming freely through the map. So why bother?
Now for the characterization and plot. Some choices were made, and we can’t be sure were the right ones. The story in Sherlock Holmes Chapter One is pretty straightforward and even interesting at times, but the way they decided to portray sherlock is just weird. Being a prequel, Sherlock does not have his faithful companion, John Watson, with him. Instead, his interactions and thought processes are resolved via an imaginary friend, who, to make things even more confusing, is also called John, because why not? Who can forget Sherlock Holmes’s faithful companion, a figment of his imagination called…John.
Sherlock Holmes Chapter One is a fun game, but there is a lot of work for improvement. The mystery-solving core mechanics are interesting and challenging, but the rest of the game just feels superfluous. If you like Sherlock Holmes, you better stick to Cumberbatch’s version, and if you like detective games, there are better options, like L.A. Noir or Murdered: Soul Suspect.
