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Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments (PS4) Status: Playing I started playing this game on Sunday 7 April, 2024
Current opinion of this game
No comment, yet.
April 30, 2024 06:32:16 PM
Finished it! (with platinum trophy too...thanks to a little help with one of the cases) Really interesting game - especially the uncertainty around the cases - I think you can just make bad calls and move on, which I find fascinating. You also get a moral rating...because you can determine the correct culprit(s) and motive(s), but let them off the hook, or let it be resolved politically (instead of via the police). Now that I sit back and look at the entirety of the game I'm surprised (positively) by: a. Most (all?) of the main developers on the game have russian-sounding names! A little sleuthing and the game was made by a Ukrainian studio! (I wonder what's up with them nowadays...). Cool! (I wonder if their Ukrainian culture made its way into the game in some way? I don't mean directly, just as a "design sensibility" kind of thing...). Perhaps that's why Holmes was often reading a book by Dostoevsky while travelling to different locations? I think it was Crime & Punishment...(which is also the subtitle of the game! OH! I just realized that!) b. The game really has a rich and varied set of "little moments" that are used once, or a few times which really add to the experience of the game being varied and interesting. Some of them are the little investigations you make, or the science experiments, but it was also fun to briefly "be" Toby the dog following a scent trail. The "time line" animation in the 5th case was also neat. c. The cases are also interestingly varied - with different culprits, execution, methods and so on. THe last one was particularly fun because it was perhaps the most "traditional" in the sense of all the evidence pointing to a clear culprit! (when that was not the case). They also varied in terms of complexity and what you had to pay attention to. So, full marks here! Ha! d. Sherlock has a telescope in his apartment and you can peek through it. And it always shows an overweight woman wearing what looks like a negligee/night clothes and smiling at the camera. Sherlock's a peeping tom? I did see Watson peering through it once as well. I kept on looking through wondering if I'd ever see something different... but I never did. Perhaps I missed an easter egg? Anyways, I started unsure of whether or not I wanted to finish...but in the end played the whole game.
April 21, 2024 12:26:13 AM
This game is way more interesting than I initially gave it credit for (and I might even play all the cases, I'm that curious!) There's a bunch of cases, you're Sherlock and you gather clues, investigate locations, use your special "eyesight", interrogate suspects, and more. So far, this is what you'd expect. Some clues become more important and they show up in your "brain" where you can pair it up with another clue (if it's the correct one) to deduce something. Once you have enough of those, you can reach a conclusion. ALSO, once you've reached a conclusion you can decide how to act on it (usually it's either call the cops or call Mycroft - i think...). What's really wild is that in the brain-connecting clues interface, you can reach lots of different conclusions! (I think it's 4 per case, at least it has been that so far and I've completed two cases). OH! And, as far as I can tell, the you can get it wrong! And, you just move on...the game calls some of them moral choices - which I'm confused by. But the idea that you could arrive at an incorrect conclusion and the game just moves on to the next case is pretty wild. So far, I've gotten both right (because there's abutton you can press that even warns you - like "spoiler alert" and it shows my result in green - which I assume is that I got it right). Anyways, that's super cool! Oh, and the game haslots of little mini-games that you play once, and they're part of the story (e.g. taking sherlock's pulse, or arm-wrestling with a sailor).. The 2nd case is pretty neat - it takes place in the UK, there's a missing train...and there are rich Chilean (and Mexican) businessmen involved! Whoah.

Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments (PS4)