Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments

Frogwares' Sherlock Holmes franchise has quietly become one of the best names in adventure gaming. The games based on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's legendary sleuth and his sidekick Dr. John Watson have been steadily getting better for a decade now,...

At this point anyone who hasn't at least heard the name Sherlock Holmes is probably also living in the Amazon jungle and thinks a fun time is sleeping in a tree and not getting killed by a...

In the words of Danny Elfman, “I've always been a sucker for mystery.” It doesn't matter what form it comes in if there is a survival horror or an adventure game, if there is something to be solved then the game is afoot. When a Sherlock Holmes game...

Crimes and Punishments offers a huge advance in graphics and gameplay for the Sherlock Holmes adventure series, and is well worth playing for longtime fans -- especially if they're playing on a new-gen console or PC. The cases are thoroughly enjoyable,...

Sherlock Holmes video games notoriously don't work. They're usually a poorly sequenced set of puzzles strung together with nothing more than a loose plot based on previous stories. Crimes and Punishments is a fully 3D and interactive world so hopefully...

The Testament of Sherlock Holmes was my first exposure to Frogwares' series following the famous detective, and despite some issues it really clicked with me. I especially liked the way it surfaced different elements of the investigative process, like...

If Crimes and Punishments has a major failing, it's the existence of a real answer. Either commit to having true right and wrong or don't, but the weird balancing act robs the game's most interesting structural choice of much of its power.

I absolutely loved diving into the mind of Sherlock Holmes while playing this title. People who have read, watched, or played anything else from his world will no doubt find something familiar and enjoyable in Sherlock Holmes: Crimes & Punishments.

I chose to let one criminal escape the country after killing a horrible man in a heated drunken argument and in a later case read a newspaper clipping saying he’d ended up killing himself from the guilt, and I felt a sense of vindication, that I was right to let him go.

Sherlock Holmes Crimes And Punishments doesn’t have any kind of multiplayer mode, but it offers a fairly long (about eleven hours) and remarkably enjoyable storyline, especially in the final 3 cases, that will keep you hooked and eager to solve all of the available cases.

Any time you approach a suspect/NPC with a new dialogue set, you get hit with another 5-10 second loading screen. There’s a serious jump up in quality in these conversations, but it gets disruptive. Considering how small most of the areas in the game are and how often you have to talk to people, this is hard to justify.

It takes more than a deerstalker cap and an “Elementary, my dear Watson” right before the case is solved to capture the essence of a Sherlock Holmes mystery. The setting, the dialogue, the logic, and of course the deduction and intuition of the master...