Overview
Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective, also known as Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective Vol. I, is a historical-fantasy full-motion video menu-driven adventure game developed by ICOM Simulations and released for the TurboGrafx-CD, Commodore CDTV, FM Towns (Japan only), and MS-DOS PCs in 1991 with Sega CD, VIS, and Macintosh releases in 1992.
A video game adaptation of the tabletop gamebook of the same name, based on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's famous fictional sleuth Sherlock Holmes, and an early example of "multimedia" CD-ROM games utilizing fully-acted FMV cutscenes, Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective tasks players with helping the titular detective (along with his partner, Dr. Watson) in solving three separate mysteries (The Mummy's Curse, The Tin Soldier, and The Mystified Murderess) in late 19th-century London.
Like the gamebook, much of the game involves using the game's resources to find the next lead, whether it be from reading the newspapers, reviewing notes, sending out the Baker Street Irregulars - a group of street urchins Holmes befriends in the books - to discover what they can, or directly visiting locales/characters (the last of which shows a FMV cutscene). When the player finds enough sufficient evidence, they then present it to the judge along with their reasoning (in a quiz format) to determine if they solved it or need to retry the mystery. On a success, they are scored based on how less time is wasted (with additional penalties for following red herrings).
The game was followed by two sequels. The first of these sequels (Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective Volume II) also saw Sega CD and TurboGrafx-CD releases, but the second (Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective Volume III) was exclusive to computers. The game also received an interactive DVD release on Ocotber 2, 1999, and each of the three cases were digitally released separately for modern PC and Mac computers by Zojoi on September 30, 2012 (on Desura) and June 8 2015 (on Steam).
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