Sherlock Holmes: Crimes & Punishments Reviews

A confident reinvention, despite the obviously low budget.

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Crimes and Punishments is a game that is otherwise fantastic in nearly every aspect it devotes its time to. It’s a game that reminds us of how great Sherlock Holmes is, and why the character has endured for so long. But it’s also one that reminds us why Conan Doyle wanted to abandon the character. You can’t escape him. He’ll always decipher the clues, always find you, always see through the most perfectly planned murder. He marches ever onward, against the flow of time, holding on steadily. He’ll always be there, Watson in tow, ready to take the next case.

Overall, Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments is good. It's intriguing and quite easy to get swept up in. There are always things to do, and before you know it, you've spent three hours in a timespan that felt more like one. Sure, the game has issues, but they're not impossible to overlook in favour of the more thought-through aspects. Crimes & Punishments is one of the better, if not the best, Sherlock games out there, and if that's not saying much to you, it's also one of the better investigation-style games. The balance and variation of gameplay should be applauded. The developers are definitely onto something here.

Morals and manners.

Finding enough clues quickly will allow you to make an arrest pretty fast too, but it’s almost always the wrong choice. You’ll need to acquire most, if not all, of the clues in a case to make the right arrest. The issue with this system is that lots of the clues are super vague and seem like they could be paired with multiple other clues or with none at all. This leads to you pairing together clues and not feeling confident about it at all. Pair this with each case having multiple conclusions with only one right one I’d be surprised if most players got the right ending on their first try. Thankfully you can replay the ending segment if you want to redo your choices.

Sherlock Holmes often finds the proverbial smoking gun linked to a murder. In almost every case he takes on, he uncovers damning evidence that puts a killer behind bars. His proficiencies are all over the map, turning him into a super-sleuthing chameleon capable of becoming a shrewd interrogator, skilled scientist, master of disguise, untouchable combatant, undetectable thief, and any fantastical profession that leads to a miraculous case-breaking revelation.

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For all the hard work it puts in, Sherlock Holmes: Crimes & Punishments deserves an audience, a big one, worthy of its time. Not only is its production a true spectacle, towering over many others, but its sophisticated gameplay elements are many, varied and rewarding to boot. It does a nearly flawless job to include an abundance of content that stays original, but also furthers a sense of intelligence importance with players from conquering all those different angles. Well played, sir.

It’s difficult to find a detective game where you can actually solve a mystery how you want to. In Sherlock Holmes: Crimes & Punishments the deduction board gives you this ability, which ultimately leads to a number of different conclusions to each case. You can also enjoy a great sense of satisfaction as you make a plot revelation. Visually, Sherlock Holmes is brilliant, from the detailed crime scenes to the realistic facial animations. The clunky gameplay, frustrating mini-games and inconsistent voice performances do detract from the overall experience though.

Smartly written dialogue, strong voice acting, and terrific graphics help make up for some technical flaws as well as a couple cases of that would offer little challenge to Sherlock Holmes.  A must play for Holmes buffs, but it's somewhat slow of pace so action seekers would be wise to look elsewhere.

Even with that misstep, Crimes and Punishments is easy to recommend to fans of Arthur Conan Doyle's most famous creation or adventure game fans just looking for something different. It may not provide much in the way of deductive challenge, but it succeeded more than any mystery game I've played in genuinely making me think.

Sherlock Holmes is the ultimate alpha male. He may not be particularly strong, but he has the ability to crush any man with his incredible intellect – and in Crimes and Punishments, a PlayStation 4 adventure loosely based upon Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous short stories and the BBC’s more modern adaptation, he practically revels in the act. This is an often bleak game that portrays the titular detective as a genius, teetering on the edges of insanity. But while developer Frogwares has been confident enough to take the famous character in a unique direction, has it managed to build a good game around the psychopathic protagonist?