The Testament of Sherlock Holmes

 PC
User Score
7.7

Generally favorable reviews- based on 173 Ratings

User score distribution:
  1. Positive: 120 out of 173
  2. Mixed: 38 out of 173
  3. Negative: 15 out of 173

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  1. JimCorbett
    Oct 16, 2013
    6
    Testament is a fine adventure game. It has an "investigation" flare to it to help it fit with the Sherlock Holmes name. The story is better than I expected but it still isn't all that good. There are many holes in it and it doesn't offer a very climatic ending, the most exciting part of the story seemed to be 3/4 of the way through. The controls are unintuitive and the optimization is notTestament is a fine adventure game. It has an "investigation" flare to it to help it fit with the Sherlock Holmes name. The story is better than I expected but it still isn't all that good. There are many holes in it and it doesn't offer a very climatic ending, the most exciting part of the story seemed to be 3/4 of the way through. The controls are unintuitive and the optimization is not good. Voices often become desynchronized with the characters lips, the engine seems to chug at times, slowing down the framerate. The puzzles are either very easy or so confusing that you'll be searching for help online. There is a serious lack of pacing not only in the gameplay but in the story as well. It's these elementary issues that prevent Testament from becoming a top-of-the-line adventure game.… Expand
  2. Bmane
    May 22, 2014
    5
    This review contains spoilers, click expand to view. The Testament of Sherlock Holmes: no denying that this is the best title of the series so far. But Focus Home Interactive have a long, long way to go to get the series potential to its fullest.

    This is one of those games that is neither terrible nor great, rather it's somewhere in between. Sherlock Holmes still suffers from a few flaws that were present in the earlier games, that FHI seem to be missing each and every time, and failing to correct it.

    Lets start with flaw number 1 that has been present since the series began: The voice cast for the role of Sherlock Holmes has always suffered. Either they've got a hammy actor doing the role, or a rather dull Holmes that gives the impression that the voice actor would rather be somewhere else than in the studio reading lines. The latter is the case for this game, in which there is no emotional connection between the player and Sherlock Holmes. Have the creators ever watched any tv series? Have they watched Jeremy Brett's portrayal at all, who is renowned for being the best Sherlock of them all?

    It's a puzzle because the voice acting for Dr.Watson has, while not been spot on, certainly a better choice than the main lead! I do feel however that Watson was a bit overzealous in his excitement this time around and the writing was quite poor for him.

    Flaw 2: Plot. Yes, the plot. The plot has been improved and is quite impressive starting off, but it quicly goes downhill. Here's a lesson Folks; if a game asks you to control a dog, whose primary responsibility is to 'sniff' for clues, then yes, you know (or should know) that the general writing/plot has gone downhill at this point. Seriously Focus? Nice idea on paper, poor implementation for a Sherlock Holmes game. I don't want to play as a hound, nor do I want to sniff around for visible cues. This was perhaps the most serious flaw in the game and there's more throughout, but this was a serious distraction and one that made me shake my head in disgust.

    I've yet to come across a Sherlock Holmes game from FHI that I could say I enjoyed. Some may call that 'bitterness', I call it having standards when it comes to a series. Others take the Sherlock Holmes series with a grain of salt and accept that despite the lack in quality at times, they are more than happy to have a game that is set within the realm of Sherlock Holmes. That's fair enough, but I take the different approach that I would rather have a game that is true to Sherlock Holmes and gets the joy of solving a case across to the player.

    Dog sniffing aside, this isn't the enjoyment and I truly hope that the new upcoming Sherlock Holmes game will deliver on quality and enjoyment.

    I mean, surely they have to make a good game at some point? Right?....    … Expand
  3. TheAlgerian
    Nov 2, 2013
    7
    This review contains spoilers, click expand to view. The trailer was very misleading, the game was far from being as dark as it was suggested, especially since the characters (especially Watson) went out of their way to seem as enthusiast as possible throughout the game.

    Speaking of which, the voice acting wasn't bad but the writing didn't make it sound authentic and tried to much to hold your hand. One example among a few hundreds is when you get into the journalist's office in the lobby, you take a look at a coffee pot and Watson blatantly yells "it's still hot!" so you know someone was here not long ago.
    A more subtle approach of this would have been welcome, such as a discrete whispering "ouch, it's hot" like he wasn't really trying to make a point at all.
    Plus, the game went also out of its way to make it look like it wasn't so much that Sherlock Holmes was intelligent, but rather everyone else including Watson was dumb as a bag of rocks, completely incapable of figuring out the simplest things.

    That said, comes the gameplay, the trailer again and the beginning of the game offered a lot of promises they didn't really deliver in the end, you start by investigating a burglary and then a murder right after, with all deduction boards and other cool Sherlock Holmes stuff.

    But after this, most of the time you end up seaching for tools to break into places or other things like that, and it turns much more into a MacGyver game than a Sherlock Holmes one, you find a ladder, another one, an iron wire and you build a big ladder, two sheets and you get a rope. And if you don't create the exact tool you're supposed to, you're not going anywhere. No matter the far-fetchedness (yes, new word, get used to it) of the said tool, you have to make it, there's never any way around.

    That being said, comes the scripting. It was... well, quite flawed. The worst example i encountered was towards the end, so I call:
    SPOILERS:
    You get into the amusement park (or circus or whatever), you have to confront the prince and lie to him about Moriarty, but first you have to walk around by the trailers, so you do, you can see by the window without needing to click it that the 3 Russian Brothers are in one of them, but if you don't click the windows to watch them like the game wants you too, you're stuck, you can go see the Prince but nothing will happen until you go and click that window which you won't think of doing if you already know they're here and you shouldn't have to do it anyway.

    That said, I'm not saying the game is terrible, it has a lot of potential, but for one thing it's not exploited very well, and for another thing, it's far from what you could expect when you see the trailer.

    If another Sherlock Holmes game is made by Frogware, I just suggest a lot more deduction boards and other detective stuff and a lot less MacGyver do it yourself stuff.
    Also a lot less hand holding in deducting things would improve the game and in a two birds a stone movement would prevent the characters from being forced to sound like they're complete morons who can't figure out by themselves that two bullets in the head is not a suicide.
    Also loosing the over-scripted events.    … Expand
  4. Fuzi0n
    Jun 16, 2013
    6
    -The Storyline is full of plotholes and is badly written
    -Quite a few factual errors (e.g. radar in 1898? WTF?)
    -The puzzles are rather mediocre and very basic -The graphics are improved, which is nice, but the graphics engine runs like s**t. Not only does Crysis 3 look better, it runs like a charm unlike the horrible engine in this game -If you play with a 1st person then you are    -The Storyline is full of plotholes and is badly written
    -Quite a few factual errors (e.g. radar in 1898? WTF?)
    -The puzzles are rather mediocre and very basic
    -The graphics are improved, which is nice, but the graphics engine runs like s**t. Not only does Crysis 3 look better, it runs like a charm unlike the horrible engine in this game
    -If you play with a 1st person then you are very likely to miss clues/items, because the LOD (level of depth) is extremely low
    -And a bunch of other negative things.

    The game is only mediocre and defintely a major step down from previous Sherlock Holmes games (I have played them all).    … Expand
  5. timthegreenbeas
    May 9, 2013
    5
    Okay so I've just finished The Testament of Sherlock Holmes the video game. Here is my review. I give it a 4.5 out of 10 due to the fact of simple graphics and poor game play as well as a general lack of open game play. This is the first game I ever bought used that I'm glad the company who made this will never see a dime.

    Okay lets tackle the first thing that annoyed me in this game.    Okay so I've just finished The Testament of Sherlock Holmes the video game. Here is my review. I give it a 4.5 out of 10 due to the fact of simple graphics and poor game play as well as a general lack of open game play. This is the first game I ever bought used that I'm glad the company who made this will never see a dime.

    Okay lets tackle the first thing that annoyed me in this game. The lack of instructions. Every time you had to do a minigame it just said solve the mini game. Which got very annoying and since they aren't repetitive, I keep saying what do I have to do here? Even as I looked this up on youtube to try to solve them, the narrations of the people where highly confused taking them on average 6 or 7 minutes to figure it out what you needed to do and then another 6 to 10 just solving it even after they themselves looked it up on the internet.
    Another thing besides the minigames that confused me were the items and how they were used. Near the ending it got better because they became more obvious, like a ladder just standing 3 feet away from a window with an action icon next to it. But in the game you had to go to an attic tear open a magician's cloak, which was in a locked trunk, get the keys that will open anything sewn into the cloak on the inside after turning the cloak upsidedown manually which the stitch you had to pull could barely be seen due to poor lighting and bad graphics, just to open a tool shed which you could have used a crowbar on, (which was in your inventory) in real life.

    Next were the graphics. It irked me that this game looked like it should have been in the N64 era of gaming. No real detail in anything including the faces or even in the cut scenes. This game was clearly never about good graphics.

    Last but not least the non open play that the game states on the cover. This game promises to be an open game where you can interrogate who ever you want and do what ever you want. That is a bold faced lie. You have to do everything down to the exact detail of what they wanted of you and if you do not do it, you can not progress in the story. You can't even guess at combinations. You have to find the paper with the combination on it, decode it, find some key to unlock it as well and then come back and put it in. It is like that for almost every lock in the game. It's a nice feature but it gets so repetitive and annoying after the first 2 times you do it.    … Expand
  6. yogurtspy
    Nov 9, 2013
    7
    Good game. Reasonable length. Some of the puzzles are more luck than judgement however which makes you sometimes reach for an online guide. Didn't find the voice acting as bad as some have found it. It's the diabolically bad lip sync which spoilt it for me. A bit of spit and polish if there is another one in the pipeline and it would get a full 10. As it is I got it cheap, and i'm glad IGood game. Reasonable length. Some of the puzzles are more luck than judgement however which makes you sometimes reach for an online guide. Didn't find the voice acting as bad as some have found it. It's the diabolically bad lip sync which spoilt it for me. A bit of spit and polish if there is another one in the pipeline and it would get a full 10. As it is I got it cheap, and i'm glad I played it.… Expand
  7. Mpbpl
    Mar 31, 2020
    7
    An elementary game.
    The Testament of Sherlock Holmes is a fine modern game of the point & click mystery genre, but it feels that was rushed in its release. DO NOT PLAY THIS GAME IN FULLSCREEN! The games tends to crash when autosaving or saving in fullscreen which is a pretty bad flaw, I still got another crash when playing in Windowed, and in these games crashes are unforgivable, since    An elementary game.
    The Testament of Sherlock Holmes is a fine modern game of the point & click mystery genre, but it feels that was rushed in its release. DO NOT PLAY THIS GAME IN FULLSCREEN! The games tends to crash when autosaving or saving in fullscreen which is a pretty bad flaw, I still got another crash when playing in Windowed, and in these games crashes are unforgivable, since you will have to do entire sections again which in these games means talking to same people, making the same exact puzzles, it is more annoying than in other types of games. With that aside, there is a lot to recommend, Holmes has an excellent voice although Watson could be better, but the rest of the cast does a fine to excellent job. The problem of the game(to me) is that this is just one big 10-12 hour mystery game that it's story is based on one of the most famous cases of Sherlock Holmes history, so even though I felt that the story was too long, it actually had to be a very grand adventure.
    The puzzles go from fairly easy to very very difficult, you will sometimes get extremely annoyed by one puzzle or another and there is a big focus on them, sometimes you move from puzzle to puzzle and little investigation which is not that great in a Sherlock Holmes game.
    I found the ending satisfying me, when all the main characters actually show a great deal of character that me feel that this adventure tested all the character to their extreme and yet back to the simple man again, it felt great in the end if only the game had been polished before release...    … Expand
  8. Almoststan
    Feb 6, 2020
    5
    Its... fine, I guess. There are moments when the story is good and some puzzles walk the fine line between tough and fair, and some puzzles that seem hard to do at first make you feel smart once you use your own logic to crack them.

    But my god are some things infuriating. Puzzles can feel extremely convoluted, things to pick up can seem extremely hard to see, pick up icons can sometimes    Its... fine, I guess. There are moments when the story is good and some puzzles walk the fine line between tough and fair, and some puzzles that seem hard to do at first make you feel smart once you use your own logic to crack them.

    But my god are some things infuriating. Puzzles can feel extremely convoluted, things to pick up can seem extremely hard to see, pick up icons can sometimes not even appear unless you are stood in very, VERY specific spots. Some puzzles can be sussed out by yourself way before you pick up all the clues; which is a necessity for every puzzle.

    As for story, its ok at times with some decent voice work, but can be bad at other times. Watson especially spends the majority of the game sounding like an absolute dumbass; not the typical level of intelligence you'd expect from Holmes' sidekick.

    I also must mention game performance, which is abysmal. I got it on GoG, but it seems from research that other platforms get the same problems with performance ,in particular the game will very commonly just hard crash you out if you attempt to save. It sometimes happens after an autosave too. Supposedly its something to do with too many saves (it actually keeps every single autosave in the game as separate game files), and it works fine if you play windowed instead of fullscreen. And therein lies another issue. No borderless window, so an egregious panel persists on the top of the screen, and, for some reason the performance completely tanked in windowed. I got frame drops and stutters and poor textures, even though in fullscreen i could run it on highest with no issue. I recommend playing windowed mode though, as autosaves are few and far between, and random crashes will make you lose progress ( I had to do the last bit of them game about 10 damn times).    … Expand
  9. Woolee
    Nov 20, 2021
    7
    Testament is a fine adventure game. It has an "investigation" flare to it to help it fit with the Sherlock Holmes name. The story is better than I expected but it still isn't all that good. There are many holes in it and it doesn't offer a very climatic ending, the most exciting part of t

Awards & Rankings

98
#98 Most Shared PC Game of 2012

Critic Reviews

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Metascore
73

Mixed or average reviews - based on 18 Critic Reviews

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 9 out of 18
  2. Mixed: 9 out of 18
  3. Negative: 0 out of 18
  1. PC Master (Greece)
    Feb 6, 2013
    60
    The authentic Sherlock Holmes, never uttered the phrase ‘Elementary, dear Watson’. Instead he said ‘when you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth’. Thusly, when after six games, Frogware refuses stubbornly to acknowledge the fact that Sherlock Holmes’s character and nature fits perfectly in a traditional adventure game, the truth is that, as a studio, it cannot, or does not know how to, create correct puzzles. [January 2013]
  2. Gaming Age
    Dec 7, 2012
    50
    All I can say is if you're a maniac for Sherlock Holmes stories or adventure games, then there's going to be something here for you. I'm not sure what I'd call it, but it's definitely something.
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  3. Destructoid
    Nov 22, 2012
    75
    Despite complaints, it's a compelling story with some standout moments and surprising twists. Even more surprising is that the narrative does make sense in the end; a Sherlock Holmes story needs to be tight and logical, which this game manages to pull off overall.
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