Simple explanation of Sherlock Holmes Chapter One is a game where you play as a fledgling, 21-year-old consulting detective who returns to Cordona, the Mediterranean island where he spent time as a child. It’s a third person puzzle adventure. You gather evidence, cross-reference it all, and then come to a conclusion about the case. Young Holmes returns to Cordona to find out how his mother died a decade ago, and is helped by Jon’s best friend, this season’s Creepy Watson. Boy, did they get some scraps along the way! Bingo, bango, has your opening.
But the complicated explanation is that this game, ironically, defies explanation. As I played, I wavered between thinking, “This is the world of Frogwares and we all live in it!” and “What’s even going on, what is this, I need a ten part documentary series that just follows the developers around because they really have a lot to explain.”
Sherlock (or “Sherry”, as Jon calls him in a turn that I absolutely love) and Jon form a wonderful partnership, both dressed up as two young men in one last LARP. crap week, only friends are friends. Sherlock is a cold, analytical guy who gets to play a very smug guy. He reviews all the evidence and sums it up. Jon is hilarious and imaginative. He’s got wild ideas and is the one who lingers to look at pictures of prostitutes, and say things like, “Are you sure you don’t like art, Sherry? “
And this partnership is a bit like Chapter One as a game.
As for how you actually play it, this is Frogwares’ best effort, by some margin. The developers took the best from Lovecraftian and depressed them Sinking City and make them less uncomfortable. Sometimes you have to look up everything in the city archives, but it’s clearly marked when you do. Sometimes you need to go to the crime scene at the intersection of Mud Street and Busywork Ave., but they are less frequent or mixed up with a bit of “opposite of this cathedral that you can see a mile” , which makes navigating Cordona a whole lot more enjoyable. Not available zero trailers back and forth, but there’s significantly less.
It helps to make Cordona itself a nicer place to stay as well. It’s much more intentional in its design than the dingy, flooded streets of the Sunken City, with different districts having dramatically different architecture and citizens. It was a beautiful sunny day and it wasn’t just mud or full of obvious repurposed door properties. I love standing around watching the NPCs are all quirky and dress appropriately for my day job.
The process of making a case is also a lot more fun. The clues you pick up from the area have very few markers attached to them, indicating if you need to explore somewhere else, ask the suspect about it, interview people in the area or actually Show off your special Sherlock Detect-o vision to trace a path or examine even more clues. It takes a while to understand the complex language of playing the game – for example, if you need to track a cart, you can’t do that unless you’ve pinned the piece of evidence that reads “track cart” as it does. At your active duty, and this is sure to put you into uncomfortable walls from the start. But you get there in the end.
Combat in Chapter One is also a type of puzzle, limited to sharding where you aim for powder sacks, lamps, bottles, etc. to disarm enemies, then knock them down with a non-dealing QTE Deadly. attack. If you kill anyone Jon will be disappointed. This is all good.
Landmark cases that bring you closer to finding out what happened to the mother, use your Mind Palace. This is a mental board where you link evidence and generate possible conclusions to the case. However, the side cases (you can take quests from your brother, or don’t keep an eye on your ears around town), are usually very busy and don’t use the Mind Palace. These things you have to solve off-piste, with more creative thinking from the player. There was one case involving a dead person in a safe that I was particularly interested in figuring out how, despite the fact that I was pretty sure I was wrong. In another, I had to find out which warehouse belonged to the three gang leaders by listening to the workers groan and seeing what was going on. It feels like, with Chapter One, the Frogwares have finally struck a balance between holding hands with their consulting detectives and plunging them into a cold, emotionless world to figure things out on their own.
And then there’s the other half of the game, which is what you’re actually interacting with, and it’s metaphorically showing it begging and blowing a raspberry. This is the half of the game where you can find an elephant guilty of murder. Where you can dress Sherlock as a vampire, no excuses. You go to an Eyes Wide Shut-style mask where men are wearing khaki shorts and body belts. All very funny. In fact, Chapter One is full of things that are meant to be amusing. Like, Jon keeps a notebook of his own, where he writes compliments to Sherlock when you’re doing well, or insults when you mess things up, and given the game’s full context, this is extreme. funny and funny.
But Chapter One also does a lot of things that, although not really offensive, are very stupid. In certain disguises (the wardrobe element isn’t really as integral as you might think), Sherlock will be “Do A Voice”. The outfit called ‘Slavic Gangster’ is designed to look like an Adidas tracksuit. I imagine the fact that there are no suits named ‘Itsa Me, Mario’ is due to Nintendo’s well-known approach to intellectual property protection. I don’t know if I should be grateful for that.
But there’s so much more. Sometimes an NPC will be marked as “Irish Pickpocket” but speak with a strong British accent. The visual inference Sherlock does is just as pointless about classical head measurements as looking at someone’s hand and deciding they’re pickpockets partly on the basis of how long their fingers are. In one instance, Sherlock looked at a presumptive male suspect and said “wide hips, not Adam’s apple, [Matt Berry voice] you are a woman!“- but it is clear in his reasoning that he sees no need to reveal this to anyone else. This revelation has nothing to do with the case, but Frogwares goes there anyway.
Sometimes it does this: offers ways to make Sherlock a better boy. Another case involved a woman killing a group of men who attacked her, and you can let her go, in which case Jon strongly approves of Sherry. One major case involved finding a refugee woman who had been raped, and deciding whether to help her and her children, help every fugitive other than herself (?) arrest the rapist. Yet another time, we discovered a childhood friend we thought we had helped to get out of prison had been beaten up by the police in his cell. Sherlock was furious about this.
There’s a disclaimer about how the game depicts the mistreatment of minorities as wrong at the time, and still wrong now, etc. But it still reminds me of the time I played TRPG with someone who created it. create NPCs in an abusive situation with the sole purpose of saving those NPCs and, I don’t know, look good in a fictional situation they’ve created themselves. Why not turn some NPCs into great people having a good time, being cool and need your help for a good cause? This is a game where I made an inflatable sex doll for an elephant!
Sherlock Holmes Chapter One is somehow both the best game I’ve ever played and is as smart as a bag of ice. What happened to Mrs. Holmes is, on many levels, best left unspoken, but it’s almost exactly an accurate look at that Charlie Day plot picture: a complex web Consists of clues and conspiracies that impress in the execution, but are embedded in stupidity. It’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever loved and enjoyed; The best thing I’ve ever ridiculed. I wish it success while also hoping that it gets screened in a million joke tweets. I can’t wait to finish all the sub-cases I have left over, and I’ll laugh at two out of every three of them. I can’t explain it more than this, readers. That’s why I’m not a real detective. And why Sherlock Holmes isn’t.
