In The Awakened the rainy London streets and the sunny alleys of New Orleans (complete with borderline local accents) feel more dense. These are all improvements! I often think that Frogwares' vaulting ambition is what spreads their games thin. The locations are smaller, so the signposting is easier to follow. You need to ask people for directions, but you don't have to change your facial hair and put on a grubby shirt to do it. You'll have to cross-reference information in Holmes's archive, but it only happens a couple of times and you can do it straight from the menu rather than hauling ass across town to a specific building. This is all stuff you'll recognise from Frogwares' stable, and it's a finicky, clicky approach to detectoring that I enjoy - but in this case it's a stripped back version. The game helps you along by recording the evidence you've found and tagging it with icons to tell you if you need to ask someone about it, explore the crime scene more, or take to the streets to canvas locals. These are less fun than the real world puzzles, which involve walking around examining crime scenes, using a concentration mode akin to Batman's detective vision, and putting clues together to form conclusions. These hallucinatory sequences occur at a few pivotal points, wherein Holmes suddenly finds himself in a nether-realm and has to solve puzzles by deliberately walking into swinging blades or memorising an invisible bridge path through a mirror, and so on. You also do that thing where Holmes imagines what might have happened in a scene John Watson believes in the supernatural, more specifically God (emotional, a fool!), and Sherlock Holmes does not (cool, rational), so Holmes can cement his arc in this game early on by being like "ho ho, Watson, but you believe in the supernatural because you are a cretinous boob, ho ho." It's obvious, but Frogwares are short on time to do character development, godammit, and it's still fun when Holmes starts having Great Old One adjacent hallucinations and, as a consequence, becomes more wild-eyed and less shaven over time. Like any good video game characters, Holmes and Watson travel via static conversational cutscenes in identical train or ship carriages. It's a journey that'll take the absolute boys Haitch and Dubs from London to Switzerland to New Orleans and back again. The idea is that this is the case that cements Holmes and Watson as an actual crime fighting duo rather than roommates, and what begins as a jaunt to find a missing servant slave, if we're honest, leads to the discovery of a big weird cult brainwashing the poor and funded by the rich. It's one for the fans, this, as the Holmes and Watson here are the sexy young models who aren't quite on bestie terms yet, and as a direct sequel to Chapter One there are references to catch (my favourite being Watson ribbing Holmes for the latter's old habit of rolling only one shirt sleeve up). It's a smaller, less ambitious game than Chapter One with some jank knocking around, and I wouldn't recommend it if you're not a fan of the series, but you know what? I think there's a glimmer of greatness in the very fact of its constraints. It's also got new puzzles and areas, and a slightly rewritten story to account for this being a sequel to Sherlock Holmes: Chapter One. Which is to remake the old Lovecraft-themed Sherlock Holmes game, but with new assets. If I was trying to make video games in a warzone and: a) my last game was a big sexy prequel to my long running Sherlock Holmes series b) the one before that was a Lovecraftian detective game with pretty recent assets and c) my back catalogue contained a Lovecraft-themed Sherlock Holmes mystery, then I'd probably do what they've done with Sherlock Holmes The Awakened. Sherlock Holmes The Awaked (remake) reviewĪ slightly janky Lovecraftian Holmes adventure in neo-classic Frogwares style, offering decent fun for fans of the studio's work.įrogwares are in a bit of a tight spot at the moment, being as they are a Ukranian studio.
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