This is the third Sherlock Holmes game I've played, the others being "The Awakened" (released before Nemesis) and then "versus Jack the Ripper" (released after Nemesis). And it is by far the worst one so far.

You know those boring hidden object games, were the game puts you in front of a small screen and tells you which objects to find? This is similar, but instead the game puts you into a huge open space without even telling you what you have to do or look for.
At on point, for example, you're in a huge square that takes ~2 minutes to surround entirely, NOT counting the inside, the few sidepaths, the stairs you can climb and the buildings you can enter. And here you have to find... 4 small birds.

It leads to tedious running in circles for ages because you miss small objects, or a stair you can ascend, or a door you can open. This happens 5 or 6 times in this game.

What makes is worse is the fact that Nenemis repeats one of the flaws of "The Awakening" which almost killed the game for me back then: The riddles are too linear. And that's a problem especially regarding items. Sometimes you click an item that looks important, but you can only look at it. You proceed until you solve the next step of the puzzle, and suddenly there's nothing to do. You walk around this huge open area and you've already clicked everything there is to click. What did you miss? Nothing, actually. It's simply this: The item you wanted to pick up before, but only could look at, you can suddenly pick up. And as you don't know this (why would I try picking something up that I couldn't pick up before?), you spent even more ages running in circles like an idiot.

This makes kind of sense from a narration's perspective, but NOT in an adventure game.

All of this tediousness is interrupted by ridiculous riddles. Sometimes you have to answer questions to proceed, but the answers are simply too strict. You learn that you have to find a specific painting in a gallery and the game wants you to tell Watson about it. You try the name of the ship, the ship model, the name of the admiral on the ship, the countries involved, the name of the battle, the location, even the name of the painting... nothing works. The correct answer is: boat
Some other annoying things like sliding puzzles (hate them!) and jigsaw puzzles (you can solve it in your inventory, but when you put the puzzles tiles on the correct place and put it together there, it additionally rotates the tiles... just why?) and a horrible weaving puzzle that is pure trial & error.

The whole plot is laughable and barely makes any sense.

"The Awakening" was, despite many flaws, quite enjoyable. "Sherlock Holmes vs Jack the Ripper" was a great game that improved on almost every single feature. But this one I didn't enjoy even a minute.

Although this entry is a step above the previous low points in the series, I can't recommend it to even the greatest Sherlock Holmes fans.

The writing, while not bad, cannot be considered good - it's simply boring. Watson is made to be an imbecile (as per usual in the Frogwares games), and Holmes goes on postulating and grandiloquising about five times more than he should do in his numerous speeches.
Virtually every character that you meet is either eccentric or idiotic, the locations are *too* large when you are forced to find tiny clues and objects to further your progress, and the quiz that you occasionally have to answer fluctuates wildly between incredibly specific and unspecific answers.
As with the other games, you can't collect items unless there is a reason to do so, which can be especially infuriating in situations both where the environment is huge, and when Holmes randomly decides to just start picking things up, breaking the gameplay style that you have been forced to play by for the past hours.

On the plus side, while excessively large, the locations do look nice, and the first time that you hear the short endlessly looping soundtrack, it isn't unpleasant on the ears.

Ultimately, Nemesis isn't a bad game, just one of the dullest point-and-clicks that I have ever played.

"Type in the answer:"
NELSON
"Wrong"
LORD NELSON
"Wrong"
ADMIRAL NELSON
"Wrong"
LORD ADMIRAL HORATIO THOMAS NELSON
"Wrong"
... looks up answer...
*sigh*
HORATIO NELSON
"Correct"

So I picked this particular Sherlock Holmes game to get my detective-game fix upon seeing it be basically the only one with positive reviews. I hopped in expecting clunky but workable game mechanics, decent story, decent voice acting and generally logical puzzles and riddles. But frankly, the game fails on all fronts, based on the 4-5 hours I was able to stomach.

I'll keep this short. The 3rd person camera is terrible. The 1st person camera works far better, but due to terrible mouse-smoothing, will make you sea sick. All the mechanical aspects are terrible, from the controls to the UI to how it runs. The voice acting is terrible. The plot is... I have no idea. Didn't get far enough to reveal the big play, but from what I've seen, I'd expect it to be the standard affair. The writing is terrible. The graphics are passable. Arguably one of the better parts of the experience, which is saying something about the rest of it.

But by FAR the worst part of it are the puzzles, riddles and generally what you're expected to do. Your first task upon starting the game is to go to a book store and find a book. The manager of the book store gives you a hint on it's whereabouts: "it's on one of the shelves". That's it. So you stumble about the book store, trying to find the right shelf. When you do, you get like three paragraphs worth of text that immediately gives you the answer to the game's first riddle.

Then you get the second small riddle. After you've wrestled the terrible UI into submission and figured out wtf the game is asking you to do, the answer is again immediately obvious. Then you get to the game's first real mystery. To start off with, you have to stumble about an indoors area looking for a book. It's not hidden, it's just on the floor of one of the rooms. And this is where the game really started to get on my nerves for the first time. You're asked to answer a simple question, with a simple answer. I typed in "Person A's ship". Wrong. I typed in "Captain A's ship". Wrong. I typed in "A ship". Wrong. "Naval battle". Wrong. "Naval scene". Wrong. No, the right answer was "ship" or "boat". ♥♥♥♥♥ sakes.

By this time, I had pretty much figured out everything that was going to happen. Pretty much to a T. But the game wouldn't let me prevent it from happening, despite the fact that I very easily could've. Fair enough, can't solve the crime without there being a crime first. So the crime happens. I already figured out how and how to solve it, but you're asked to stumble about the crime scene, finding the absolute RIGHT set of footprints. There are tons of them on the floor, all belonging to the criminals, but you have to find the right place to examine. For absolutely no reason at all. Then you examine the crime scene, find all the evidence, but the game stops you on your tracks. So you run around some trying to figure out what the hell it is exactly that you're missing. In my case, I had failed to measure one print. Despite the fact that I'd already established who the criminals were and how many of them there were. The game wouldn't let me progress before I'd done this arbitrary, pointless thing again. And not only that, it's incredibly fiddly where you need to stand for the game to let you examine the prints closely. If you don't stand in the right place, nothing will happen.

So at this point, I'm getting pretty peeved, but I push on. Next, you're supposed to find the right paintings and do the right things to these paintings. How does this work? You walk around the gallery as Sherlock, and when you get within 10 meters of the right painting, Sherlock will automatically zoom in on the right one. So you don't actually need to find anything. Just walk around and the game will hold your hand and point out the right one.

But the biggest d1ck move will come shortly after this. You're following clues and again finding the right paintings, but a different set of paintings. You find like two or three paintings and do what you need to do, when the game throws the most idiotic clue of them all at you. You need to establish north, without having a compass. Then, from there, follow an extremely vague and stupid set of instructions to stumble upon a different painting. Which is right next to the previous one. But even if you manage to do that, finding the painting is not enough. No, you need to look at a lamp that's behind a curtain next to the painting.

The game gives you no clue, no hint at all that you're now supposed to look at a lamp. So you'll be stuck here, desperately trying out all options and pulling your hair out, until you finally look at the hints that outright tell you to look at the lamp.

I played a little further than this, but it's just more of the same. But at a point where even the hints call the answer to a riddle "convoluted", and you find out you couldn't possibly have figured out the answer unless you went out of your way and rummaged through Sherlock's personal belongings at an arbitrarily determined point after the start of the game, I had had enough. And if you did look through his belongings, the answer is completely obvious, but since I didn't, I couldn't know it. Mind you, the game gives you no hint that this might be something you should do, or any hint that the villain would know of this thing from Sherlock's past.

This is where I had my fill. Not only is it a bad detective game, it's just a bad game. Fails in all the ways a game can possibly fail. Don't buy, don't play.

My review series of the Frogwares Holmes games continues with Nemesis, also released as Sherlock Holmes vs. Arsene Lupin. While I believe that this was the best Frogwares Holmes game to date at the time of its release, and is not without redeeming qualities, it's still a hard sell in 2022.

The followup to the Cthulhu-mythos inspired game The Awakened, the Holmes series swings back away from the supernatural. In this game, the famed fictional French thief Arsene Lupin begins stealing a series of famous English treasures while also leaving cryptic clues intended to taunt the detective. Compared to Awakened, Nemesis feels like a much longer and much more challenging game that sacrifices narrative for puzzles. This Sherlock Holmes game is about 95% puzzle and just has a thin crust of story, so non-puzzle-people should definitely stay away.

While graphically and mechanically identical to Awakened, the technical issues I experienced with earlier Frogwares games are not present in this title, and the game runs smoothly. In earlier games, hotspot issues require toggling awkwardly between first-person and third-person views in order to see and interact with everything, but that kink has been ironed out here, and both navigation methods are viable (though third-person is quite a bit slower). The only issue I experienced with Nemesis is sometimes textures are missing on interactable objects, particularly doors, resulting in the object appearing as a coal-black void in the game world.

At first, I was prepared to give this game a positive review. Nemesis has a promising start, and I was really excited by the game's first major setpiece, in which Holmes investigates an an art museum heist. Holmes can explore the whole museum in first-person, with galleries full of famous pieces, and he even has a comment on every painting. For the first time since I started playing these Holmes games in order, I found myself really enjoying the experience. However, this is an extremely puzzle-dense game, and very frequently your reward for completing a hard puzzle is being met immediately with another puzzle that is even harder, and the game dragged on, and before long I was just completely over that museum. Later in the game, a similar massive chapter set in a history museum had a similar draining effect.

Over time, you notice that Nemesis commits a number of adventure game sins. The areas in the game are insanely massive, with lots of small hidden hotspots that you have to find, sometimes with no direction or signposting. Some items can be interacted with or picked up only wheh Holmes needs him, requiring same rooms to be examined multiple times. There are a large number of puzzles that are total contrivances that add nothing to the story, such as one chapter-long puzzle where the goal is to scour the enormous Tower of London to locate and trap 6 small birds. Other puzzles have absurd limitations - one puzzle requires six weapons from the armory to be placed in the correct order into six pedistals in a basement on the other side of the map, but Holmes can arbitrarily only carry two weapons at a time, requiring three full round trips at an absolute minimum and lots of unnecessary back-and-forth.

Puzzle quality and difficulty is all over the map, and it's a shame, because amidst all of the puzzles in this game that are unnecessary and/or tedious, there's some that are quite good, and well-designed. There are classic inventory puzzles, riddles which require an open-ended answer to be entered into the text parser, cryptic clues in poem form that need to be deciphered, lots of math/numerology-type things, jigsaws, etc. This game will absolutely have you reaching for hints or a full-on walkthrough if you intend to complete it, though, because the game's tenancy to throw hard and tedious puzzles at you in quick sequence will wear you down to the point where it becomes hard to enjoy the good ones.

Holmes and Watson still behave like total dinguses in Nemesis, as they did in Awakened. While not as odious in this game as they were in the last one, they still find the time to engage in extremely questionable or flat out dumb behavior. In this game, for instance, Watson obliterates a priceless museum artifact to create a diversion, steals a precious memento from Holmes to pawn it, and also steals Holmes's cocaine in order to give it to a prostitute, just to name a few things. Holmes lets some obvious clues slip right under his nose.

I thought the game was picking up in the fourth chapter. There's a fun sequence where you nab a few small-time crooks and the story is starting to mount something resembling tension. With the Queen in danger, Holmes and Watson rush to the palace to meet with the most powerful people in government. And then, of course, the great Holmes is sent on an errand to recreate a dog food recipe and locate four wooden dolls, and meanwhile, Watson scrambles to find a new pair of trousers for the Prime Minister because some pee got onto the ones he is currently wearing, and at that point, I completely gave up on the game's story. While the last chapters do move a bit more quickly than the earlier ones, the game's story just peters out into a confrontation with a very underdeveloped antagonist and an ending that is definitely not worth the effort.

However, if you want to see a well-dressed man ride the Rosetta stone like a surfboard as cops open fire on him, maybe it's the game for you?

This is without a doubt the worst Sherlock Holmes game in the whole series for me. I hate it. I hate Arséne Lupin from the bottom of my heart and I want to never ever see him again!

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2932262761

Visuals are fine, but filled with a few graphic glitches like walking through a closed door. Music is of a classical genre, but as there repeat only a few tracks it can get tiresome in the long run. Voice acting remains varied between good and bad. Gameplay is still the same, now for the first time the game begins with a tutorial and most of the game elements get introduced. You can again choose to play from first or 3rd person view (and yet again I have found the first person view more appealing). Big improvement is that when you are required to answer one of the many questions you can freely access Sherlock's diary and check the notes! What hasn't improved much is that sometimes you can answer very vaguely and sometimes you have to answer in precise wording. This inconsistency usually leads to a big confusion and later frustration.
If you ever become stuck you can use the in-game guide which is pretty neat. It won't spoil you right away on the puzzle as it will offer you hints and by them you can try to solve it. Sadly the answer doesn't offer an insight on how exactly you should have realized such a solution (and I would love to know in some cases).

Main focus of the game is puzzles and there are a lot of them. You will spend all the time going from one puzzle to another without a proper break. There is a huge amount of backtracking in every location you visit (Tower of London and Museum are the most ridiculous) and after the second location I just wished for it to be over soon… seemed to me like an eternity.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2932262892

The beginning is quite promising. During breakfast Sherlock and Doctor Watson stumble upon a letter by famous French thief, Arséne Lupin. In it he states that in a few days he is going to rob England of its five most valued items and by doing so he will utterly shame the Englishmen. As Sherlock can't stand such impudence, he accepts this challenge and promises to catch Lupin before he can fulfill his threat! Hints hidden in the letter lead our duo into the National gallery. There we have to deduce which one of the paintings is gonna get stolen. Even though we run around the gallery like idiots it's fun. We get to learn some facts about the presented arts and the riddles are quite reasonable.
The second area, Tower of London, stops being fun and instead turns into despair. Our main objective is to search for birds in the location, but the area is so insanely large that discovering them is almost a miracle. I thought that they would be making some sounds that would lead us to them… yeah, they do, but only if you step on the right but utterly tiny spot! The bird is on the ramparts, you search underneath them, but nothing happens so you go to search elsewhere… though luck, you just missed that spot! I have spent soooooo much time there running like stupid… it was really frustrating.
But don't worry, the next area is even better. British Museum turns into a torture. Lupin leaves behind notes with poems which should point yet again on his target. I liked the poems… at the beginning, but there is no end to them and I started to really hate them. You will find dozens of them in the museum. You will be yet again running around like crazy, doing one puzzle after another without a real sense of joy upon their solving. On one good clever puzzle there are three more stupid ones which mostly don't make any sense!!! I have really tried to solve most of it on my own, but with a few puzzles I had to consult a guide. Maybe if I tried to think about it for a few days… weeks… months… I could have done it, but to be honest I couldn't be bothered and just wanted it to be over already.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2868865758

The rest of the game continues in the same vein and looks like a satire to the whole franchise. Doctor Watson probably underwent a lobotomy, because he is acting so stupidly that every time he is on screen you want to give him the final blow of mercy!
I haven't enjoyed this one. If you decide to try out Nemesis beware of the huge number of puzzles and riddles and their overall unbalanced difficulty.

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Edit:
My reviews for other games in the series:
Sherlock Holmes: The Secret of the Silver Earring
Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened (2008)
Sherlock Holmes: The Mystery of The Persian Carpet
Sherlock Holmes and The Hound of The Baskervilles
Sherlock Holmes versus Jack the Ripper
The Testament of Sherlock Holmes
Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments
Sherlock Holmes: The Devil's Daughter

It's not a good game. Graphics are pretty good for the time when this game was made. The story is interesting. But that's it.

The problem with this game is the obtuse puzzles. You can't really guess any solutions or figure out (unless you've got loads of time in your hands). The lore is too long to read. All conversations are too versbose and cannot be paused.

One good thing is the built-in hints system (which is infinite). I found myself using the hint system way too frequently until I realized that I'm not really playing the game but rather just following the hints.

I've played a few of the Sherlock Holmes games and the only one I can truly recommend is Crimes and Punishment.

Nemesis is okay. I just lost interest when I found myself having to run around in search of birds to lure and catch.

I know at some point I'll return to this because, even though I've given this a thumbs down, I do quite like the Sherlock Holmes games. Get it in a sale. 3/5

Normally I don't like leaving a game unfinished but in this instance, where I was trying my utmost to discover everything by myself, without a walkthrough and without using the in-game hints, I feel cheated.

The game has a sound premise, I'll give it that. I come into this game having already played (and loved) one other Sherlock title, so perhaps my expectations were high, but here I was thinking, 'This can't possibly go wrong.'

Gosh was I ever wrong.

Starting the game, you are given a few screens of text to read, indicating the importance of finding everything and taking your time to search thoroughly so you can succeed, but in all honesty, I feel these paragraphs totally laughable. You have to find everything to proceed anyway - you can't 'miss' something and still try to progress, so the whole idea of a possible Failure Ending is already rubbish. If you can't find everything, you can't proceed.

So already the game has a shaky foundation for true detective work.

Before you even get control over the gameplay, you are stuck staring from a camera panning down empty 19th Century London streets in what is supposed to be an intro to Sherlock's residence, but I couldn't watch it. The graphics are so shoddy, so appalling and abysmal, that I felt a raging battle within every fibre of my being not to gouge out my eyes and jump up and down on my monitor. The streets were EMPTY. Not only is this a pure fiction already, but it was SUNNY. Not a single shadow anywhere to be seen. I thought it was supposed to be London, not the OK Corral after a bloody shootout. If that was the intent they should have put in some tumbleweeds.

So, strike two. Not even playing the game at this point and to be honest, not looking forward to it in the slightest.
__________________

I should say here, before getting to strike three, that I tried to like the game. I managed to get through the first act, where the first theft takes place. I thought I did pretty well considering the limitations apparent in the game.

The limitations stem from the graphics. More the lack of interesting things to pass your cursor over. If there's nothing interesting to look at, then there's nothing to click on, and thus the overall complexity of the game is reduced. So when you do see something out of the ordinary, it's too OBVIOUSLY something you need to investigate.

This comes back to the paragraphs of warnings at the start of the game. Just, why? Why say anything about being observant at all, when you haven't put anything into the game to diversify the scenery? Ergo, there is a lot of running around and tabbing to the map menu so you can teleport, because the game is plodding. Investigations are so obvious it is a wonder Watson isn't the main character and Sherlock is on holiday in Bermuda or whatever.
___________________

But here's the straw that broke my anger reserves. In the next act, I was following a clue about MacAdams to get a clue to a combination lock, but even hovering the magnifying glass over the SPOILER location, it would appear the art is ambiguous. It could be a 3 or a 5. There's just not enough of a difference to tell either way.

So after trying the combination with a 5 and it failing several times, I tried the Pitt code, even though I knew that would make no sense based on the documentation I held. That didn't work. So I went into the clues menu and forced it right down to the last clue, so it gave me the answer. Sure enough, the menu answer is not what I was reading in the art.

Naturally I flipped out and Alt-F4'ed. I've got better games to play and catch up on, instead of going cross-eyed and myopic from examining pixels in minute detail.


_______________

There is no game here. If you want to be Sherlock and follow logical clues and not be forced to cheat to figure out the answers, then this is not for you.

On the other hand, if you want to torture yourself, or you feel the need to experience how NOT to make an enjoyable game, then this is for you.

I wanted to say that I would and also would not recommend this game to others, but that all depends on the type of person you are and the game you're looking for. If you're the type of person who enjoys an endless to-do list of urgent things that MUST be done with the utmost urgency, then this game might just be for you! I enjoyed the details of the game and the thought-out, detailed clues to look for; however, I was unable to play this game without the constant use of the in-game walk-through. Maybe I just need to brush up more on my British historical knowledge! Who knows! Would have appreciated some type of built-in game "break" rather than having played a sleepless Sherlock. Poor sleep-deprived Watson - but he really did deserve it!