This game has too many flaws to be recommended on its own. I bought it as a bundle containing a lot of Frogware's Sherlock Holmes and enjoyed it thinking that the other games were enough for the price I payed but I wouldn't pay for it on its own.

The reason I don't think it is worth buying itself is the badly executed gameplay mechanics. Through the game you have to switch between third person and first person. A lot of the first person perspective gameplay is just too difficult. The areas are huge. I don't think many people like pixel hunts in giant 3D environments.. There is a hotspot highlighter but not all hotspots highlight depending on which perspective you are playing from. You also have to get really really close to some of the hotspots to make them highlight.

The trigger mechanism of the game is also annoying. The game will wait until you have located all the hotspots in a certain area before the plot can advance and some of these aren't very relevant to the plot and can be really hard to find.

In theory you can consult the game's built in hint system but it reveals more spoilers than help.

This is all a shame as the plot and character scripts are really, really, good. Playing it with a walkthrough close to hand I actually really enjoyed the story and some of the puzzles which didn't require too much hunting in huge 3D locations.

If you happen to be buying a bundle of Sherlock games then 'Testament', 'Silver Earring', or 'vs Arese Lupin' are worth about $10 each on their own so don't be put off by the inclusion of 'Awakened' but I wouldn't buy it alone.

Do not purchase this game. At some point, you'll run into the issue that it will not allow you to save the game.

Steam should ban developers from selling games that need to be debugged to launch in modern Windows systems.

I'm not here to debug your game and run compatibility tests. Make it work or delist it from Steam.

I've recently awakened a weird, latent obsession with janky, wonderful, mid-00s adventure games. Now, in the spooky month, I decided to try out the spooky-sounding next entry: Sherlock Holmes: The, er, Awakened.

First of all, there's a lot to like. Awakened feels mechanically similar to the previous Silver Earring, except with a handy toggle between first and third person that will eventually become the default of the series. It still hits up all my favourite Holmes tropes, like how the absolute madman will just secretly disguise himself to make Watson look like an idiot (I call that move "The Baskerville"). There's even now a hotspot flagging shortcut—Sherlock Holmes has brilliant powers of observation, but I don't, so I welcome anything to cut down on the asinine pixel hunting of the last two cases.

Now those of you with brilliant powers of observation have probably already noticed my rating, and you've deduced that something goes terribly wrong. Some of this is the story—Awakened takes a hard Lovecraftian bent into Cthulhu Mythos territory which has good and bad repercussions. The good is that the game is shockingly tense, with some gory moments my stomach and I were entirely unprepared for. But it also means the case itself is meandering and secondary, with no clear suspects or antagonists to egg you on—just a string of random trips around the world dealing with an ill-defined cult

There's also a lot of racial caricatures that the game seems ill-prepared to handle; the worst example is a superstitious black woman who tells Holmes "Mistah, you must be sum kinda hoodoo man!" and is straight up lynched(!) as a warning to Holmes. And the (known) perpetrators... are never dealt with? Realistic for 1890s Louisiana, I suppose, but the goofy Sherlock Holmes adventure game doesn't seem like the place to clumsily comment on historic racial brutality.

And call me a purist, but there's something wonky about straight up supernatural elements in my Holmes.

All that plot stuff is subjective, of course, but an objective issue with The Awakened is that it runs like hot garbage, even considering this is the "remastered" edition. The number one issue is that the game just won't save after playing a while. There's no known solution to this—the developer response on the forums is to update your video drivers which, yeah, no, thanks, I think I've updated my drivers some time in the last twelve years. Judging from the log it generates, the problem appears to be running out of memory; apparently later Sherlock Holmes games with this problem can be fixed by making the game large address aware, but doing that here just crashes Awakened.

Also note that this continues to be an issue with Sherlock Holmes games. That's certainly cooled my weird obsession a bit.

There's a pile of other issues as well. In one case Watson, preparing for his creepy turn in Nemesis, teleported behind me when he was supposed to be in a barn. Luckily, my goal was to go talk to Watson, what a stroke of luck! But because I didn't go back to the barn, a cutscene on my way there didn't trigger. Half an hour later, the cutscene finally triggered (involving characters who had long since left the scene). But now, the game state had reverted to when I needed to talk to Watson in the barn, but talking to Watson no longer progressed anything, rendering me soft-locked. Fortunately I keep multiple saves, because I had even saved my game a couple times in this unintentional walking dead state.

That was the worst example, but there were lots of other animation issues, trigger problems, glitchy objects, dumb puzzles and more, enough that I genuinely didn't think I would be able to finish the game. I did finish it, with a lot of persistence and redoing a lot of content. But I definitely don't think it was worth putting up with the glitches—Awakened overall was by far my least favourite of the Holmes games so far.

Mystery of the Mummy, aka the Sherlock Holmes game they give away because it's too buggy to charge for it, ran better than The Awakened. In my review I said recommending Mystery of the Mummy was frankly irresponsible, so this game being even less stable unfortunately gives me a pretty damning reason not to recommend Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened.

After having to install Nvidia Drivers to even get the game to run, the game crashes at the same point every time. I bought the entire collection hoping to enjoy some of my favourite Holmes games, and it's been a complete waste of money as most of them don't work.

Saving the game doesn't work and there's no fix for it. Didn't feel like finishing the game in one run.

The story was captivating enough to keep me longer than 30 mins this time before I rage-quit. The game mechanics are absolutely infuriating. if you miss to click on a tiny little detail (even if it is TOTALLY UNIMPORTANT) you cannot advance the story. I have been looking for almost 2 hours now what I missed. I know exactly how story is going to progress and what the next step is, but i am simply not allowed. I consulted 3 different guides and watched a youtube playthrough of the section- and I STILL DON'T KNOW why the heck I'm stuck for no ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ reason. Must have missed a fly on the window or some ♥♥♥♥! I just cant be bothered any more.

The setup sounds great, Holmes & Watson inexplicably drawn into a world of fantasy horror... Except the follow-through is a boring and groan inducing embarrassment. It has little to do with either the works of Conan Doyle or Lovecraft and the tonally devoid hot mess that follows is evident of that. Looking at it simply as a game it's a frustrating series of clumsy and broken puzzle mechanics; if you've come for a narrative or engrossing world though then you're really in trouble. The plot attempts to string together kidnappings in England, an asylum in Switzerland, a swamp in New Orleans and finally a lighthouse in Scotland using some vague Cthulhu cult to no definable end. It's all so disjointed you realize about halfway through that it's not going anywhere. Professor Sullivan has a blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo but nowhere in the narrative is Innsmouth (home to The Esoteric Order Of Dagon) or any of the creatures of Lovecraft's mythos. Cthulhu himself is never even mentioned by name! So what you're left with is less a sect and more a social club that stuff dead people full of squid and call it a herald of the apocalypse. It's just incredibly stupid. It doesn't work as a mystery, it doesn't work as fantasy horror, and it just plain doesn't work as a game.

If you played one Frogware Sherlock Holmes game you played them all (with the exception of newer entries)

If you have ever scoured the steam sales page or are a fan of detective games you will have seen frogwares shocking amount of Sherlock Holmes games. These games are "fine" they're not outright garbage there is effort to due justice to Arthur Conan Doyles work from Sherlock's home to the period he lived as well as him and others character and personality. Where these games differ from OG Sherlock is in the stories told, they don't focus on Doyles stories or anything like your typical Sherlock mystery. No their more fanfiction if anything: Sherlock vs Jack the Ripper or Lupin the thief or even Cthulu (yes really)
What killed these games for me is the lack of payoff to the story the puzzles and being poorly optimised. I won't spoil the stories in case you want to try these games though you aren't missing much. I don't know if its being a smaller studio but these games have bugs and aren't properly optimised I had pop ins, things clipping into each other, sound being to quiet to loud or none at all. Worst of all is some of the puzzles are just not fun to do and pad time. Now some are smart and go along with case being solved like figuring out the profession of a killer by what knife he used, and comparing the cuts of different knives to identify the blade at the crime. But more times than not it shifts into what I call an activity centre puzzle from edutainment or mobile games. Like rearrange the painting or sort colours out and of course get the ball to the center of the maze. The problem is these puzzles have obvious solutions and don't add to the games narrative and theme of solving the case, like sure we could find a clue but isn't it more fun to line up a set of items on a shelf in a certain way from a photograph than just finding the a vital piece of the puzzle.
I have not played all these games I only bought three from a steam sale and boy I didn't I get my money's worth. I hear the new ones are more polished and redid the core game mechanic to be more about Sherlocks thinking and deduction progress which sounds more better. As for the ones they made in the 2000s I don't recommend. Fun fact these guys made Hound of the Beskervilles and a Dracula game on mobile that used you guessed it activity centre puzzles. Not surprising.

I remember playing this game long time ago, and I remember loving it a lot. Now I decided to give it another chance, but, unfortunately, I can not recommend it in current (and most likely unchanging) state. I got a crash couple hours into the game (when we travel to Switzerland ) and then I realized that game does not have any sort of autosave - which is actually not that weird for point and click adventure game, but in the end because of this crash I lost a lot of progress and don't really feel like replaying it again

And even besides that, it's not really that good of a point-and-click-adventure game, it is incredibly difficult to play without any sort of walkthrough - not because of difficult puzzles, most of them so far are actually pretty good, but because this game has giant locations that are mostly empty. So it's basically pixel hunting up to 11. I had to wander around for twenty minutes before I managed to find a rope. Thankfully, this game does have an integrated "strategy guide", but, unfortunately, the fact that it needs one is a sign that it's not really that well designed

But one thing that I *loved*, was the atmosphere. It's creepy, it's unsettling, you really get immersed in it. Cults, murders, temples, Chtulhu - what not to like here?

If you willing to give this game a shot - it does worth it, just be careful and save more often, who knows when game-crashing bug makes you lose progress. As for me - maybe I'll try again at some point, but now I just want to drop this game for losing couple hours of my progress 😔