Frogwares and Neil Gaiman, Neck-In-Neck

One of my very favourite short stories is “A Study In Emerald”, by Neil Gaiman, which speculates on what might happen if the famous Victorian detective, Sherlock Holmes, had lived in the same universe as the famous Victorian horror-demonic-god-creature, Cthulhu. I’m not such a big fan of Lovecraft myself, but, if you’ve looked at half the entries on this blog and/or my About Me page, you will quickly realize that I do very much enjoy reading about Sherlock Holmes. (Notice how that is phrased very carefully to include pastiche and fanfic as well as the original canon stories!)

Anyhow, the Gaiman story is great because you can just barely understand what’s going on without much familiarity with either Conan Doyle or Lovecraft, but, if you have read the original stories, everything takes on a subtle new dimension of meaning. And who doesn’t like throwing rational, logic-headed, uber-mensch detectives with their antithesis – inhuman, mystical, soul-destroying deities? In other words, Sherlock Holmes + Cthulhu = <3

Which is why Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened is a freaking awesome computer game.

Maybe I should start with a caveat here: my attitude toward games of all sorts* (video, computer, board, real-life, etc.) is similar to my attitude toward fanfic: though I’m aware that there are many who consider these things to be crass or utilitarian – or even, patronizingly, children of a lesser muse, I consider them to be a work of creativity like any other more accepted medium: painting, sculpture, poetry, novels, cinema, theatre. To me, they can require as much artistic merit and/or be as profound as any of those other media I mentioned. (Would you like me to justify these statements before I go any further? Too bad! Hahahahaha!)

Anyhow.

Oh, wait, another caveat: I’m not a “gamer” or even someone who plays video games regularly. I do, however, find myself increasingly interested in them these past couple months, and, like many children of the eighties/nineties, I grew up enjoying SNES and Game Boy games. I owned the latter but not the former; I sucked at both. As you were.

In keeping with my habit of reviewing things that have been out for a while, Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened came out a couple years ago and was recently released in a “remastered” version, which is what I bought from here last week. It runs OK on Windows Vista (my operating system… yes, I know), although sometimes the whole thing slows down or temporarily freezes when I play for too long (though this may be more of a result of the fact that I’m running out of hard disk space and/or seem to have a cooling-fan problem). As far as I can tell, what “remastered” means is that you can now play in third-person as well as first, a couple bugs have been fixed (like the infamous Teleporting Watson problem), and there’s a whole system of hints and an option to hit the space bar to see all the hot spots in an area, rescuing you from pixel-hunting and your computer from being thrown across the room in a fit of frustrated rage. But I get ahead of myself.

In this game, you play (on different occasions) Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, but mostly Sherlock Holmes. As it begins, Sherlock is doing his usually whiny ENNUI! I AM A GENIUS! WHY ISN’T THE WORLD MADE TO ENTERTAIN ME? All that changes, however, when the servant of one of Watson’s patients goes missing. Investigating the simple disappearance, Holmes and Watson find themselves drawn into an international cultish conspiracy of weirdos who murder people in increasingly gruesome ways.

Naturally, Holmes and Watson investigate in a typical Victorian fashion: by exploring areas, talking to anyone who moves, reading everything they see, and picking up anything that isn’t nailed down to add to their inventory. Of course, those objects always come in handy solving puzzles and problems somewhere down the line in this point-and-click adventure. You also get to measure footprints, follow trails, sedate a guard, and even chase a thief through the streets of nineteenth-century New Orleans to a raucous hillbilly soundtrack. (Sherlock Holmes + Dueling Banjos = WIN?)

The thing about the demo that made me decide to buy this game (well, in addition to the whole Sherlock Holmes/Cthulhu thing) was the control system. It’s set up like a first-person shooter (or so I’m told): use your mouse to point Holmes in the right orientation, and click to advance. You can right-click to access a whole bunch of fun things: all the objects you’ve picked up, transcripts of every important conversation you’ve had (THANK YOU, Frogwares. If there’s one thing I hate about adventure games, it’s having to go back and talk to someone ten million times because you need to know one little detail that came at the end of their ten-minute monologue), every document you’ve picked up, and reports of every observation you made. You can also click on the map for quick and easy transport between locations, or you can choose the “?” button for a list of increasingly helpful (sort of) questions and answers for each stage of the game.

The simultaneously best and worst feature of the game is the fact that it won’t let you progress until you’ve done everything in a particular area. This is good because it means you don’t have to backtrack when you discover you needed to pick up that whatever back at Baker Street to finish a puzzle in New Orleans, and whatever the problem, you know you have everything you need to solve it, either in your inventory or around you. It’s bad because you can’t go work on something else while you try to figure out the answer to a really tough puzzle, and some of the things you need to do to progress make no sense. For instance, you have to click on every last clickable part of a trail of footsteps in order to “find” a safe you already know is there because it’s one of the sections of the FAQ on the hint section. You can’t go find it even if you already know where it is, and since when does investigating footsteps outside help you see something inside?

There are also some particularly difficult problems (although the hint section is pretty good at dealing with most of them), including instances at the end of every chapter/level where you have to type in an answer freehand. The first one is pretty easy; for the rest, I had to use the hints (or maybe I was just too impatient to thoroughly read the documents I’d picked up). There’s a clock puzzle that’s pretty hard until you get to maybe the fourth clue. But most of the problems (I found, anyway), are reasonable, especially if you take the tried-and-true adventure-game strategy of “try every object in your inventory/every hot spot you can find until one works”. And you get to do some fun detective-y things, like “analyzing” evidence with Holmes’s chemistry set (OK, so it requires absolutely no chemical knowledge, but who cares?).

I also enjoyed some of the plot of the game, which ties into both Sherlock Holmes and Cthulhu as well as introducing interesting original characters. (You’ll never guess some of the people you’re going to meet in the asylum…) If the plot were written up as a mystery novel, it would be quite palatable, which is great. But I think by far my favourite part was imagining what Sherlock Holmes movies and TV shows would be like if they followed the game’s action:

EXT – Victorian London, day
WATSON and HOLMES are standing by a HOUSE where someone has just been kidnapped
HOLMES: (picking up a pieces of evidence) This might be useful! I should analyze this at Baker Street!
HOLMES walks back to Baker Street, but stops at the door.
HOLMES: (to himself, firmly) I haven’t yet gathered enough evidence!
HOLMES goes back and runs around the HOUSE three times. He puts a LADDER in his POCKET. Then he tries to open a door in the garden wall.
HOLMES: (to himself, contemptuously) I have no reason to go there.
HOLMES runs up to WATSON so close his nose is probably touching WATSON’s cheek. WATSON gives him shifty eyes.
WATSON: What do you make of this, Holmes?

Anyhow, as I think you can tell, as long as a game’s controls are good and the puzzles aren’t too ridiculous, I enjoy it based mainly on the strength of the plot and characters. Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened, had everything I was looking for as well as a fantastic premise and nifty voice acting (that can be skipped if you feel like it – thank you again, Frogwares!). If you are a casual player of adventure games and/or like the Neil Gaiman story I mentioned above AND you are a) European and 16+ or b) North American and 17+ (the game is rated “M” for mature for graphic violence that isn’t really that graphic if you’ve ever watched a movie that’s rated 14A or over), you might enjoy at least playing the demo, if not the whole game. Er… if you want to get an idea of how much it costs you, I paid $26.99 US for the download.

Also, I played this demo, which is rated E, and it is definitely one of the best puzzle games ever. I fully intend to shell out the $20 American for the whole thing… well, once I finish my term papers, anyway.

* Just wait until I post my sport next week!

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