This is an ongoing list where I attempt to do the following: Play, Complete, and Rank every video game in the known universe in order to finally answer the age old question "What is the greatest game of all time?" For previous entries find the links on the attached spreadsheet.

How did I do?

It should be no surprise to anyone who might have seen that I have reviewed both recent Poirot that I would eventually make my way towards playing the Sherlock Holmes games. When me and my wife were approaching the end of our last Poirot adventure, we were researching what was going to be the next game we play together. It should be noted that at the time we were deciding this, a new Sherlock Holmes game released for PC and was getting some fairly positive reviews. This new game was not released for consoles which is what works best for us when we want to put a game on the big screen and play while the kids are asleep, but lo and behold, the Switch got a release of the Sherlock Holmes game, Crimes and Punishments, and so our mind was made up.

Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishment is an investigative adventure game. For most of the game you play as the titular character Sherlock Holmes as he investigates multiple cases in order to solve whatever crime took place. That investigation includes actually visiting the locations and searching for clues, similar to a point and click adventure (if point and click adventures had a 3^rd person perspective), handling interrogations of people, conducting weird experiments, and then internally connecting the dots to solve the case. Outside of a few QTEs, this isn’t really an action game, but a puzzle and adventure game. For instance you might be conducting an experiment back at your house and have to figure out how or what order to add chemicals to get the reaction you desire. The only real threat to these puzzles is, that some of them have a limited number of tries you can attempt them with. Should you fail one, which I didn’t have happen, but if you did my assumption would be that you don’t get the knowledge of the results and thus can’t make the correct accusation or assumption for the failed test.

There is one little thing that I should mention, which is incredibly important to how this game works. In this game there are several cases that you investigate, nearly all of them involve murder or a death in some form or another. Obviously your goal is to find the solution to the case, whether that be to find that murderer, solve a burglary, or clear the name of someone who has falsely been accused of committing a crime. What this game surprised me with, is that any of these cases you can solve incorrectly and still carry on. That means you can accuse the wrong person, have evidence point in the wrong direction, and frankly bungle up the entire case. While you would normally expect that doing so would result in a game over, or force you to try the case over from a certain point, Sherlock lets you keep plugging away. In fact you can go through an arrest scene with someone pleading their innocence, get to the end of the case stat screen and then approve your decision to push the game forward. On the stat screen, the game will tell you if you found all the evidence for the case, and if you want to spoil it for yourself, you can check if you solved the case correctly (accused the right person). I got cases wrong, trust me, but I could never bring myself to accept the wrong result to a case. Before you accept your result and move on, you can choose to change your ending, which puts you back in the shoes for Sherlock to mentally tie up the case again, or if you were missing evidence to go locate that evidence. I always took that route, there wasn’t any consequences between cases that I could tell should you constantly send away the wrong people for murder, but my conscience would not let me move the game forward knowing that I was wrong. I should have, for posterity sake, purposefully solved one wrong and moved on, just to see what happened, but I was too much of a goody-two-shoes.

This may have just been my experience, but I certainly got tripped up in more than one case, because I would miss a small detail that would not end up in your notebook. In the very first case, essentially serving as a tutorial, the conclusion seemed very clear to me, which gave me a false sense of confidence that was then dashed in so many following cases. When trying to explain what I missed, it would seem obvious to those who haven’t played the game where I went wrong, but my advice to anyone who decides to give this game a try is keep your own notebook handy and don’t just rely on the in game notebook. I mean looking at any of the Steam forum conversations for the game, you will find multiple threads of people complaining about certain cases because they felt that the game hoodwinked them and they got the solution wrong for a multitude of reasons. That is both a good thing and a bad when it comes to the game. It means that the cases aren’t straightforward, that it isn’t simply about going through the motions to reach the obvious logical conclusion of “this guy = bad, this guy = good” but rather that everyone could have a motive. I find that aspect exciting, I want to solve the puzzles and I want them to make me have to think, hell my favorite leisure activity is doing escape rooms with friends and solving those puzzles. The flip side of the coin is that you will solve puzzles and not really know what you missed or interpreted incorrectly unless you scour the internet for what other sleuths say.

The one example I will give, is there is one case where you are solving a train robbery/disappearance. Without going deep into the details, you eventually guess where the Train is currently hidden and you have two possible scenarios for where it could be located. I remember going through all the notes in the game notebook, trying to piece together what I thought the answer was and realizing that I felt it was a literal guess, because both options seemed plausible. And that is not a great feeling, I don’t want to feel like I exhausted all evidence and I could only guess as to what my result will be, I want to be able to point to an answer, even if its wrong. If I truly believe it to be so, I want to point to it and explain what my reasons are. It turns out that in this particular instance the piece of information I was missing, was from a conversation, that contained a detail that would have allowed me to lean towards the right direction, but having not memorized the conversation and that information not being uploaded to my in-game notebook, that upon review I did not remember it. I guessed incorrectly, got to the stats screen, saw I was wrong and then “tried” again with the other location and solved the case. I will cut the game some slack because it must be incredibly difficult to make a mystery game and have multiple characters and outcomes be believable enough that you don’t immediately point to this person or this cause of death as being the culprit. It doesn’t make it any less frustrating when you think you solved it and get to the stats screen and find out you are wrong.

One of my biggest complaints with this game is similar to one of the Poirot games, in that the internal gameplay aspect can sometimes not match what you are working towards. When you have gathered enough evidence, you can make deductions internally. Usually these are two choices that you decide between, and they can either lead towards you accusing someone of misdeeds, or rule someone out. In rare occurrences, these can also lead you to conducting experiments or furthering an interrogation. For instance, you might be deciding between whether or not an alibi a character told you would clear a character from the time of the murder, you can either select yes or no. Depending on the selection you make, it might open up more investigations, or allow you to accuse someone of the crime. If any of your decisions contradict each other they will be highlighted, and you can move them around, but the game doesn’t allow for nuance. Going back to the train scenario, you learn that someone was transporting an important item on the train and had multiple insurance forms that were going to make them a lot of money should the item go missing. All of these insurance forms had terms that that said something akin to you can only insure this item one time with one company, despite all these forms coming from different companies. Seems shady.. right? Someone is certainly breaking the law and has a potential motive as to making sure an item goes missing, however you either have to accuse them of stealing the train or say they are innocent for the crime, when in reality I felt they existed more in a grey area.. Perhaps they weren’t solely responsible, but could have played a role in the crime. The game does not really operate in the nuance area. This can lead to some frustrating internal connections, because that guy is guilty of something.. maybe not the train heist, but he is guilty at least of insurance fraud, but we have to either treat him like a victim or make him the sole guilty party.

In a similar vein, you can’t make decisions without certain events triggering during the investigation. Know that someone is innocent, think you have all the pieces put together in your head to solve the crime… well you might have to hunt to activate or trigger the event that needs to happen before you are allowed to tie things in your head together. This is less of critique, because realistically you would need to gather evidence and do your due diligence to clear someone’s name with proof and facts, but it can be a bit tedious to work towards a solution you already have deduced just to hit a certain mark in the game.

Actually I lied, My biggest complaint is that there is a whole room in Sherlock's house for putting on disguises and you rarely get to use it. Let me dress up whenever I want, its a video game.. If I want to make Sherlock wear a top hat everywhere, have a stupid looking mustache, and be wearing dirty sailor clothes, let me. I want to role play as a weird crazy man, but the game only lets you use the table twice in 6 cases, and you have to dress a certain way for both times... MISSED OPPORTUNITY.

Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishment is a really competent game, and I know that doesn’t sound like the glowing review it should be, but this is a game that had a lot of obstacles that could have brought it down and it holds up really well. If the investigations, puzzles, characters, or mystery fell flat in any way then this game would suffer, but it all works together. Sure Watson is a loser, but isn’t he always? With any puzzle/detective game there are always going to be puzzles and solutions that are more difficult then they should be, and while there isn’t a single puzzle in Sherlock I felt was hard, the overall investigations are always right on the cusp of being hard to parse. When I go back and look at the things I missed that caused me to make incorrect guesses, I would always kick myself because it seems obvious when you have all the pieces lined up in front of you, but in order to get there you need to be paying close attention to all the clues. For me, I would chalk it up to spreading out these investigations over the course of stilted weekly play-sessions where a single case might stretch over the course of weeks. Surely I was going to misremember, or frankly not remember, a clue that was imperative to the case. While me and my wife both enjoyed our time with the game, it didn’t light a fire in us the way the first Poirot game did. While I’m confident we will play more Sherlock games in the future, I do think this game might have inadvertently made us take a break from the adventure/puzzle genre for now.

Is this the greatest game of all time?: no, its fun, but not the greatest

Where does it rank: This was an easy ranking for me, I knew that it belonged in-between the two Poirot games. It didn't light our world on fire like ABC Murders, but it was certainly better then The First Cases. That means we are looking at between the 66th and 91st greatest game of all time. Once that is narrowed down, its easy. I have it ranked as the 77th Greatest Game of All time.It sits between Dragon Quest 11(76th) and Simpsons Road Rage (78th). Not two games I would think would be so close, but the list doesn't lie.

Anyone looking for it: here is the link to the list and more if you are interested in following along with me (this is not a self promotion).Here. I added links on the spreadsheet for quick navigation. Now if you missed a blog of a game you want to read about, you can get to it quickly, rather than having to scroll through my previous blogs wondering when it came up.

Thanks for listening

It’s been a while since I played it, but you do get letters from previous cases from whoever you accused. But I don’t remember if you always get them, only get them when you’re right or when you’re wrong.

I really loved this game, it’s like puzzle meditation to play. And I always enjoy seeing how they try to tie it all together. Because sometimes it felt like they were really threading the needle on managing to arrive at a solution that had to logically fit together when the decoy paths seemed much more solid.

I tried the ABC Murders, but I think something about the art style of the Poirot game just made me enjoy it less. Because apparently that’s who I am. Anyway, great read!

@pezen: thabks for the read and comment.. I can confirm you get letters when you get each one right, but they don't really impact anything. Perhaps coming to the wrong conclusion, you get letters that just make you feel bad (innocent people being sent to death, etc.), but as far as I can tell, outside of your own moral compass there are no consequences either way.

I think playing through each of the cases in one sitting probably helped me with the deduction side of things; I managed to get most of them right the first time through. It's weird though. Some of the cases very much hang on very circumstantial evidence that you have to intuit, like the one with the train, while others basically spell out the correct answer.

Anyway, I think I liked this one more than you did, but I hear the follow up, Devil's Daughter, is a lot more uneven. I'm... interested in seeing how it pans out.

@imunbeatable80: Really was surprised by this game, always got the wrong suspect and it just let me go on without saying tisk tisk you put an innocent man in prison. Lol. I think my issue was the inability or my inability to find enough clues, I wish you could find a handful and connect them good enough and still win. It seemed at least for me that there was a smoking gun set of clues even if there likely were several. Add to that, much like phoenix wright ace attorney, boy is the courtroom section more fun than the investigation since you keep hitting pit stops in your progression due to pixil-like hunting that I never got used to. The interviews and showing evidence and finding deductions were fun. Never finished the game but still have it installed for one day I do lol. Don't even know where to go think I was halfway through the game. Thanks for the write-up. XD

@arbitrarywater: thanks for the read and comment.. yeah outside the tutorial I don't think we did a single case in one sitting, which probably hurt us. Yeah, I remember your dubious blog post being more favorable, it's not that I disliked it.. I did enjoy that each case felt like a true mystery, but I think I would have liked the game if the stories connected more.. or if there were more consequences for your actions.

@topcyclist: thanks for the read and comment. I agree, there is always a set of clues that you HAVE to find in order to piece the puzzle together. Some cases even point you in opposite directions until those final clues.