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A Sherlock Holmes mystery in the style of Lovecraft - Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened Quick Review

2K View2023-04-12

PLAY IT OR SKIP IT?

Play it, but be prepared for some clunkiness. Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened is a remake of the 2007 title of the same name. I never played the original, so I can’t compare the two, but the 2023 version of The Awakened is a bit of a mixed bag. At its best, it’s a near-perfect blend of classic Sherlock Holmes and cosmic horror, with genuinely engaging investigative mechanics. Unfortunately, the high points of the game are held back by awkward controls and unclear puzzles. I mostly enjoyed the time I spent with it, but there were a few times it left me visibly frustrated, which is pretty rare for me.

TIME PLAYED

I spent around eight hours with Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened, which got me through the first three chapters of the game. It looks like the original game was around nine hours long, but I definitely didn’t feel close to the end when I stopped my playthrough. While the remake does have an expanded storyline, I also got stuck a few times, and speedier players will probably be able to make the same amount of progress in less time.

WHAT’S AWESOME

• Lovecraftian story. Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened opens at 221B Baker Street, but it doesn’t stay on the path of a traditional Holmes mystery for long. Sherlock makes some strange strange discoveries during his second case, and those revelations drag him into the world of cosmic horror. I grew up reading Arthur Conan Doyle’s Holmes tales, and it was a ton of fun watching the consulting detective try to make sense of unspeakable horrors. It feels like an authentic Holmes story, even when the game is at its most Lovecraftian.

• Investigative gameplay. Lots of mystery games will spell things out for you, but there’s no hand-holding in The Awakened. The lack of guidance was occasionally frustrating, but it was also a lot of fun to piece things together on my own. One of my favorite details was the Imagination mechanic, which requires Holmes to recreate crime scenes in his mind. I’d search crime scenes, gather evidence, and attempt to visualize what happened. Piecing things together myself was much more evocative than watching a cutscene. I felt genuinely involved in the investigative process.

• Creepy sound design. I wouldn’t describe Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened as a horror game, but there were times when it felt genuinely scary. When I was investigating, I’d occasionally hear strange sounds in the background—faint screaming, scratching, or chanting—that didn’t seem to be coming from anywhere at all. Watson didn’t seem to be able to hear these noises, which made them all the more chilling. The voice acting is also excellent, which adds a lot to the game’s more frightening scenes.

WHAT SUCKS

• Clunky controls. Since Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened is an adventure game, it doesn’t need tight controls, but there were times when it felt like the controls were actively working against me. Sometimes, I’d get stuck in a location that I couldn’t get out of. At other times, I’d struggle to highlight a piece of evidence that I needed to investigate to progress the case. These issues didn’t happen all the time, but they were common enough that I got annoyed.

• Too much repetition. During my investigations, I’d sometimes talk to people and ask them about the evidence I uncovered. Occasionally, someone would tell me something useful, but more often than not, I’d hear lines like “Sorry, don’t know anything about that,” over and over again. I don’t see the point of filling a location with NPCs if they all say the same thing. I also did quite a bit of backtracking during my investigations. There’s a fast travel system in larger locations, but when I was investigating smaller areas, I got pretty sick of going back and forth.

• Irritating puzzles. Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened has solid investigative gameplay, but the game’s other puzzles are insubstantial and irritating. There are times when Holmes finds himself trapped in a bleak Lovecraftian nightmare world. I wanted to love these segments, but the puzzles drove me up the wall and completely destroyed any sense of immersion. These segments abandon the game’s investigative gameplay, which meant I didn’t have any real sense of how I should approach the puzzles. There were times when I managed to get past a puzzle without understanding how I solved it. It would have been great if the nightmare sequences had me go through strange, horrific investigations. Instead, they were a muddled mess.

💬 Will you be following Sherlock Holmes on this Lovecraftian adventure, or will you be skipping this supernatural mystery? Share your thoughts in the comments!

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