Doctor Watson - Treasure Island is an ancient game from 2012. It's a whopping 11 years old at the time of this review. The game lacks support for any modern gaming display resolutions (or widescreen monitors), hasn't been modernised or updated to run smoothly on modern gaming PCs. Despite this lack of modernisation, it carries a pretty high price tag for such an ancient game. This seems to have been put on Steam as a nostalgia gouge.
To say this is a bad game would be an insane understatement. The general idea is that you play Doctor Watson (not Sherlock Holmes, just Watson) and you run around and dig up treasure after you dive off a cruise ship (for no apparent reason). The only treasure that's been dug up here is Arthur Conan Doyle, so the developers spit on his corpse. This truly is garbage. Like, the cruise liner you dive off is a contemporary 21st century ship. WTF? Then we're back to the 19th century for the rest of the game. It goes downhill sharply from there, with craptastically bad graphics, pointless single room mini-puzzles, collecting badly textured coconuts... at BEST, this is like a bad MMORPG without any RPG elements. Click on 10 rats. Despite the (terrible) 3D graphics, this makes Artifex Mundi mobile apps look sophisticated.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
While there are options to change the resolution for the game, all this does is scale up the simplistic 2D art assets used to make the game, which makes little or no difference to the graphics quality. Without any other substantial graphics tweaks, it's not possible for gamers to improve the lacklustre 2D visuals.
The game features lazy low-polygon "retro" assets, making this look like a barely functional 3D game from the mid 2000s. It's unclear why the developers weren't able to arrange high quality, high polygon count contemporary assets for the game, and also irrelevant... what matters is that this looks bad as a result of their decisions, a compromise PC gamers shouldn't have to put up with.
The controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers, or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts.
These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 4 players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 50,000 games for gamers to choose from (over 9,000 completely free titles), the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.
Doctor Watson - Treasure Island is relatively expensive for an abandonware nostalgia gouge, at $4 USD, and it's not worth it. The game is just too old, hasn't been modernised. And as the old saying goes, you can't go home again. Even when it was new, this was never a triple-A game. This is the kind of game that went almost directly from the warehouse into the cheap bargain bins at the front of the shop. Now, on Steam, without any modernisation? This is impossible to recommend.
