Hello, and welcome to The Wheel of Ukraineous Video Games, a celebration of video games made in the sovereign nation of Ukraine, partially borne out of frustration at my own powerlessness and partially borne by my personal brand being the hell garbage nightmare I've let it become. If you’d like to help the people affected by the ongoing war, I’ll be including a link to the Ukraine Red Cross in every blog and video for this series. Or honestly you could check out this Humble Bundle. There's some good stuff in there.

Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments

Developer: Frogwares

Release Date: September 30, 2014

Time Played: A little over 11 hours

Troubleshooting: The game crashed a handful of times

Would I play more (Sherlock Holmes games?): Yeah so I bought both Devil’s Daughter and Chapter One because I liked this one so much.

If your only exposure to Frogwares’ Sherlock Holmes games was Justin McElroy’s legendary E3 saga you’d be forgiven for dismissing them as quirky Eurojank adventure titles. While I cannot speak for the earlier games in the series, (most of which *do* seem very Eurojank) what if I were to tell you Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments is legitimately one of my favorite games I’ve played this year? That’s not a goof, not an ironic bit, not me being a sicko for sicko games (at least, I don’t think) this one actually slaps. Nothing dubious about it.

Now, here’s where I pull the curtain away and reveal that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s original Sherlock Holmes stories were a formative part of my childhood growing up. I would read through a large omnibus of stories and watch episodes of the Granada TV series with my mom as a nighttime ritual. While I doubt all of those original stories are bangers, I still treasure these memories and think fondly upon them. More importantly, I wanna bring this up because in a lot of ways Crimes and Punishments reminded me of the best part of those stories and the appeal of Sherlock Holmes as a character. While drawing from numerous interpretations over the years (esp Jeremy Brett’s portrayal from the Granada TV series,) this game feels authentic to my memories of Conan Doyle’s original material. Holmes in this game is arrogant, cold, a tad eccentric, and never not assured of his own correctness, which makes it even better when you can solve crimes horrifically, drastically, utterly wrong. (Watson, on the other hand, is also faithfully portrayed as an audience surrogate and absolute dunce.)

See, the big thing about Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments is that you very much can miss (or misinterpret) clues, accuse the wrong person, and send them to the gallows if you fuck up in your reasoning. You don’t even have to check if you were correct if you don’t want to! While not all of them are winners, the game's best cases are ambiguous enough and give enough leads that you can reasonably accuse multiple people. Between all the vestiges of adventure game-y elements, there’s a surprising amount of actual deduction required for the player, and I kinda love that. Holmes will justify it either way. Allowing the player to be wrong and subject innocent people to Victorian-era justice is both deeply morbid and inspired, and I don’t think there are many other games that rely on that kind of thinking. It also helps that some of these cases go in fucking wild-ass directions. It’s important to remember that even Conan Doyle’s original stories tended toward pulp and camp, but one of this game’s cases in particular is on some next-level Ace Attorney (hell, maybe even Danganronpa) level shit with how wacky it gets. That’s not a slight, by the way.

But, as I mentioned, there’s still a bit of adventure game here and there, mostly in the form of finding items, talking to people, and random-ass one-off puzzles or minigames. If you’ve ever wanted to arm wrestle a sailor, you can do that here (or skip it.) Outside of a particularly lengthy sequence involving secret Roman ruins that might as well be An Actual Point-And-Click Adventure Game I found most of that stuff pretty light and enjoyable. Walking around, snooping for clues and bugging people is what you’re here for, rather than being a chore. Sure, you can see the budgetary limitations here and there, especially with some of the character modeling and facial animations, but it doesn’t feel nearly as much like a B-tier eurojank game as I was expecting.

It’s perhaps a little unfortunate that this’ll probably be the best game I play for this feature, but allow me to say without any sort of irony that Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments is a banger. If my recommendation isn’t enough, I guess you could watch the archive of my playthrough, though I think I’ll also get around to the two more recent games (one of which features Himbo Sherlock, one of which features Twink Sherlock) soon enough. And by that I mean “oh god the video games keep coming out, please help.”

Darkened Skye

Developer: Boston Animation

Release Date: January 27, 2002

Time Played: a little less than two hours

Troubleshooting: none whatsoever definitely played this on a real gamecube anyway

Would I play more? You donate to the kids during the Giant Bomb Community Endurance Run next month and maybe I’ll see what I can do

One of the last games out of Simon and Schuster’s short-lived video game publishing arm, Darkened Skye, also known as “The Skittles Game,” would’ve likely come up on my radar at some point even before I found out it was made in Ukraine. That’s right, the developer known as “Boston Animation” was not, in fact, based out of Boston but mostly in Kyiv. This works for my purposes, given that the arc of the universe would’ve bent in such a way that I would’ve ended up playing Darkened Skye at some point regardless of its country of origin. I mean, how could I not, with this PC and Gamecube-only game coming out in the early 2000s, based on Skittles, put out by a book publisher and given carte blanche to do whatever? The story of how Darkened Skye was made is almost more interesting than the game itself, but I’ll leave that to the video I saw on the subject if you’d like to know more.

Now, let’s be fair here, a third-person action/adventure platformer based on a sugary candy featuring the voice of Princess Jasmine delivering a non-stop torrent of extremely 90s self-aware snark sounds like an absolute nightmare, and it's to the game’s credit that it isn’t. Oh, the platforming is ass, the navigation is clumsy, and the audio mixing is occasionally a nightmare, but like… effort was made here. The writing is surprisingly not-terrible, helped significantly by the delivery of the VAs and the almost prescient level of fourth wall goofs (like straight up there are stills of the live-action skittles commercials from the early 2000s in this video game.) I did not hate it. Well, okay, I hated parts of it. Mostly it’s a shocker that as much effort was put into Darkened Skye as there was. It’s clearly not a high-budget endeavor even by 2002 standards; the size of the environments and the draw distance should make that readily apparent.

Basically, if there ever was a definition for what constitutes a memorable “B game” this would probably be it. This is some peak “7 out of 10 by old games press standards” material right here, and for that I salute it. Is it in any way a video game I would willingly play more of (unless, let’s say, charitable donations were made to help build schools in the developing world, including Guatemala, Ghana, and Laos?) Probably not! I was raised with a N64 and Gamecube, I have an abnormally high tolerance for 3D Character Platformery and Zeldery (I think that’s what they call it) and even by that metric this is probably on the lower end. But, if nothing else, I cannot accuse The Skittles Game of being a cheap cash-in.

I'm playing through sherlock with my wife now and agree with almost everything you said, I will note that if you are trying to get the right answers without looking them up, you will probably want your own pad of paper to write down clues. The game does a good job of writing down important details for you to comb through later, but if you are solving the cases over the course of days, it's easy to forget lines of dialog that can make or break the case that holmes doesn't mark as a interesting note.

I won't spoil anything, but in the third case, not only are you solving for who the murderer is but also the weapon, and one throwaway line during an interrogation actually makes the weapon clear, but the game doesn't really call that line an important clue.

But it's a really enjoyable game and I agree more people should play it.

Starting the show with a showstopper! (talkin bout Darkened Skye obvs) This promises to be another banger season of wheel-based articles!

As someone who did play some of the earlier SH games, I was completely caught by surprise by the jump in quality from Testament to Crimes and Punishments. Legitimately good game that changed the way I look at Frogwares. They're now one of those devs I'm always kind of pulling for; I still need to play that Sinking City game.

I was only able to tune into Darkened Skye for a short time when you were fighting all those incredibly loud (and disturbingly human-sounding) tentacles. I totally missed any discussion of this game being an official Skittles tie-in, now I'm reading about it and I'm blown away that it was even a thing.

Everyone here knows your brand of suffering through the dubiousness so we don't have to. Doing it like this to raise money for people who need help just goes to show that your brand is a little deeper than that. Keep up the good work.