HomeReviewsSherlock Holmes Chapter One
Sherlock Holmes Chapter One review: the silliest thing I have ever lovedYoung, fun and full of conclusions
Young, fun and full of conclusions
But the complex explanation is that this game, ironically, defies explanation. As I played, I oscillated wildly between thinking, “This is Frogwares' world and we’re all just living in it!” and, “What is even happening, what is this, I need a ten-part documentary series that just follows the developers around because they really have a lot of explaining to do.”
Gameplay Deep Dive | Sherlock Holmes Chapter OneWatch on YouTube
Gameplay Deep Dive | Sherlock Holmes Chapter One
Sherlock (or “Sherry”, as Jon calls him in a development I absolutely love) and Jon form a great partnership, both dressed like two young men on an absurd steampunk weekend LARP, just bals being pals. Sherlock is the cold, analytical prig, played to perfection as a very smug boy-man. He looks at all the evidence and does the summing up. Jon is the fun and imaginative scamp. He comes up with wild ideas and is the one who lingers to look at paintings of bums and fannies, and says something like, “Are you sure you don’t like art, Sherry?”
And this partnership is a bit like Chapter One as a game.
Looking for a third.
It helps that Cordona itself is just a nicer place to be in as well. It feels far more intentional in its design than the grim, waterlogged streets of The Sinking City, with different districts having appreciably different architecture and citizens. It’s sunny and pretty and not just muddy or full of obviously reused door assets. I liked standing around watching NPCs being all weird, and dressing appropriately for my day’s work.
The process of doing a case is a lot more fun as well. Clues you pick up from the area have little markers attached to them, indicating if you need to explore somewhere else, ask a suspect about it, interview people in the area, or do your special Sherlock Detect-o-vision to follow a trail or check for even more clues. It takes a while to get the hang of the complex language of playing the game - if you need to track a cart, for example, you can’t do it unless you have pinned the piece of evidence reading “track cart” as your current active task, and this sort of thing will doubtless run you into frustrating walls early on. But you get there eventually.
Judo chop!Combat in Chapter One is sort of a puzzle too, restricted to set pieces where you bullet-time aim at sacks of flour, lights, bottles etc. to disarm enemies, and then take them down with a QTE non-lethal. attack. If you kill anyone Jon is v. disappointed. This is allfine.
And then there’s the other half of the game, which is the stuff you’re actually interacting with, and it is metaphorically showing its bum and blowing a raspberry. This is the half of the game where you can find an elephant guilty of murder. Where you can dress Sherlock as a vampire, for no reason. You go to an Eyes Wide Shut-style mask orgy where men are wearing like, khaki shorts and body harnesses. It’s all very funny. In fact, Chapter One does a lot of stuff that is deliberately funny. Like, Jon keeps his own notebook where he either writes compliments to Sherlock when you do well, or insults when you mess things up, and with the full context of the game this is extremely hilarious and good.
But Chapter One also does a lot of stuff that, while not being actually offensive, is verystupid. In certain disguises (the wardrobe element not actually being as integral as you might think), Sherlock will “Do A Voice”. The outfit called ‘Slavic Gangster’ is styled to look like an Adidas tracksuit. I imagine the fact there isn’t a suit called ‘Itsa Me, Mario’ is due to Nintendo’s famously litigious approach to IP protection. I do not know whether to be grateful for that or not.
Think this dude might have been stabbed, lads.
But there’s more. Sometimes an NPC will be marked as “Irish Pickpocket” but speak with a strong English accent. The visual deduction Sherlock does is also classic head-measurer nonsense, like looking at someone’s hands and deciding they are a pickpocket partly on the basis that their fingers are long. In one instance, Sherlock looks at an assumed male suspect and goes “wide hips, no Adam’s apple, [Matt Berry voice] you’re awoman!” - but is clear in his deduction that he see’s no need to reveal this to anyone else. This revelation has no significant bearing on the case, but Frogwares go there all the same.
Sherlock using his Concentrate ability - basically like Batman’s crime scene reconstruction in the Arkham games, but imaginary.
There’s a disclaimer about how the game depicts mistreatment of minorities that was wrong at the time, and still wrong now, and so on (I think it’s actually the same one from The Sinking City, a game that featured the actual KKK). But it still just reminds me of the time I played a TRPG with someone who made up NPCs in an abusive situation for the sole purpose of saving those NPCs and, I dunno, looking good in a fictional circumstance they themselves had created. Why not make up some of those NPCs as cool people having a rad as fuck time, being all awesome and needing your help for a good reason? This is a game in which I made an inflatable sex doll for an elephant!
Sherlock Holmes Chapter One is somehow both the best game that I have ever played while also being as smart as a bag of rocks. What happened to Mrs Holmes is, on many levels, best left unsaid, but it is almost exactly a literal view of that Charlie Day conspiracy board image: a complex web of clues and plotting that is impressive in its execution, yet embedded with idiocy. It is the silliest thing I have ever loved and enjoyed; the best thing I have ever ridiculed. I wish it every success while also hoping that it is screencapped in a million joke tweets. I cannot wait to finish all the side cases I have left over, and I will laugh at every two out of three of them. I cannot explain it more than this, reader. Which is why I am not a real detective. And also why Sherlock Holmes isn’t, either.
