Sherlock Holmes Chapter One

8/10, seriously one of my favourite games of the entire frogwares sherlock series a few pros - the game is stunningly beautiful. the design of the world, the textures, the lighting, it's a fun open world with lots to explore and i could genuinely spend hours just looking around at all the details and picking up the side quests (get the side quest DLCs if you are also a sherlock nerd and want the lore and references) - the story, i love this sherlock and i adore the character of jon, getting to see them both as sherlock navigates from being a smug young genius to learning some hard truths is engaging and incredibly heart wrenching at times, with enough humour beats to not make it feel utterly depressing - the cases, while at first i had some issues about a few case conclusions feeling a bit open ended, the game does also go to painstaking lengths to say 'hey, that's the point!' sherlock at this point in his story believes he is the arbiter of truth, how far are you willing to go to stand by that principle? spoilers: [spoiler] what do you do when the investigator, the protagonist, is a unreliable narrator with unchecked mental health issues and gaps in his memory? it may not always feels satisfying from a mystery game point of view to have no definitive culprit, but that's part of this sherlock's arc, a young sherlock who believes everything is quantifiable finding a case that he is too proud not to 'solve' without all the answers. i get the complaints but disregard them anyway for the delicious character conflict [/spoiler] now some cons.. - the mechanics can take a bit to get a hang of. i can't tell you how many times starting out i wandered aimlessly around a crime scene before i realised i didn't have the right evidence pinned, or needed to brute force an eavesdropping segment. you get there is the end but the tutorial certainly has a way of humbling you - the combat, now i know i certainly wasn't looking to play for the combat anyway but it is.. bad. like genuinely a QTE simulator with a lot of running in circles waiting to reload and lining up NPCs with environmental items. not what i would call a satisfying combat experience but also, if i wanted gripping combat i would not be looking for it here anyway and there isn't a [i] huge [/i] amount of combat to perform regardless - there are some elements that feel unfinished/unpolished, which with more capital and better resources i feel like frogwares would have absolutely developed more on, stuff like limited ambient voice lines, janky character models for NPCs, the combat (again) and the clothing mechanic to have people of different backgrounds offer you information which can feel more like guesswork at times. admittedly as a frogwares/sherlock fan i adored this game and loved the vision regardless, but i can see people bouncing off the game because of these elements if they're not fanatics overall, i say give it a chance! buy it in sale (or respectfully give frogwares all your money so they can build on this with a bigger budget next time pls) and if you're a fan of the sherlock mythos, i genuinely believe you'll get a real kick out of it!