Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened

Characters you love to be around, a truly thrilling story, and some decent puzzles make for a fun, if perhaps sometimes too frictionless, ride. [Issue#27, p.84]

Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened is a competent linear adventure game that seamlessly connects the rebooted story of a young Sherlock Holmes with the twisted world of Lovecraft. While it's a focused effort overall, the presentation is clunky, and the Lovecraftian elements don't get the spotlight they deserve. The enjoyable mystery adventure romp will satisfy fans of the franchise, but everyone else might be better off waiting for a sale before jumping into this case.

If you think about what Frogwares had to go through this past year in Ukraine, it’s an amazing feat that Sherlock Holmes The Awakened came to fruition. Sure, the game doesn’t break any new ground, but the team did it, and it just works! This crossover between Lovecraft and Sherlock is a dream come true for a detective and horror fan like myself. Even though The Awakened re-uses many of the same assets and engine and suffers from some of the same frustrations as Chapter One, it still remains a compelling detective experience from start to finish. There’s plenty of madness to lose your sanity to and lots of cases waiting to be solved.

The cosmic deity imagined by H.P. Lovecraft remains immersed in his eternal sleep, because in the interesting video game concocted by Frogwares it is above all the influence of Arthur Conan Doyle that drives a narrative made up of investigations and common crimes, while the horrors of the astral planes remain hidden and can only be touched in short bursts. The plot of the work - which we remember to have been packaged in a very difficult context for its creators - maintains a good rhythm which leads us to overlook the excessive pathos of some exchanges and, although it does not propose anything original within the vast panorama dedicated to Sherlock Holmes, entertains for the approximately seven hours necessary to complete the adventure.

There’s every chance more recent Sherlock converts might find themselves severely underwhelmed by The Awakened, which doesn’t really stand up against The Sinking City or Chapter One, but I nevertheless enjoyed traipsing around period locations for a few hours a night across the span of a week, the sort of popcorn gaming that isn’t appreciated enough in amongst larger, more bombastic titles that demand endless hours across their poorly paced open-worlds.

It really is admirable what a Ukrainian studio haunted by war managed to create in such a short span of time. But the compromises do show. It’s fun to solve puzzles based on Sherlock’s deduction, but the story feels disjointed, some scenes make no sense and there are several unfortunate design mistakes to boot.

Copying your own ideas is not a sin, but what worked well in a larger open-world adventure, doesn’t necessarily hold up paired with a linear story. A remake created from scratch, Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened is a decent game but also a significant step backwards compared to Chapter One.