Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective Vol. III - Final Rating

 Written by Morpheus Kitami

It's time to put the final pieces in place.

I now have the unenviable job to review not only the arguable worst game in a series, but as the guy who didn't even review (or finish) the last two games. If I am too easy on the game, I am being generous to a game I at first bounced off. If I am too hard, I am attacking a game I did not care for to begin with. So, let's do this with all the cards on the table, what I didn't care about in the past, why my rating is probably different from what Joe would have given, and where I think this went better than my experience with the first game.

It's very important that I keep that paper on my mantel with the use of a knife, lease or no lease.

Joe really liked Holmes and Watson, and I'm not sure I quite share that like. Farley is doing a good Jeremy Brett impression, and if you can't fully bring your own interpretation to the character, copy the best. I'm really not sure what Green is trying to do, and maybe that's because the developers didn't know what to do either. After all, Holmes and Watson are additions to the game rather than characters who were doing all the work themselves to begin with. Green feels like the Watson of Nigel Bruce, bumbling but not quite committing to the bit. Not the equal of Brett or the Soviet Holmes, but the inferior.

At least his unboxing videos are quite entertaining.

Then there's Lestrade. He exists, I saw him, you probably saw him. He doesn't really feel like a character as much as a policeman prop. Which isn't down to the actor, just a game that generally makes any character outside of Holmes and Watson come and go in a few moments. It's much the same with the rest of the Regulars, but because they aren't as notable in canon (if they appeared at all) it isn't as noticeable.

Getting to the meat of the game, the primary issue may be that the game expects you to do more than I do when I play casually. Which is to say, I tend not to write things down and try to keep it all in my head. Which doesn't work with a game like this. So you spend a lot of time rewatching videos of stuff you've already seen, and going over stuff I've already done can be a bugbear of mine.

Another problem could have been that I played the DVD version of the first, which was awkward and weird. If you don't know, I don't mean a DVD update, I mean a game for your DVD player. In retrospect, this was unfair, I'm sure that controlled like absolute ass, but the only thing I remember was the password saving. Even I make fun of Coktel Vision for that crap, and I'm going to rate a game fairly based on a version that does that?

My only defense is that I'm generally interested in seeing the best version of a game; I'm hardly the only one, but sometimes this leads to weird places. I'll play through the Japanese version of a game to see if it's better. But, I have no excuse for dumping a game based on an inferior port, when I'm old enough to know that sometimes the parser version is superior to the point and click version.

Pause the video to see all the important stuff is a clear limitation of the choice of medium.

That said, something I feel that's off about this game is that it doesn't quite feel like playing a game, it's watching a TV show where you watch it one scene at a time and have to infer what the other scenes you need are. In this sense, it's far more of an interactive movie than most games given the label, you decide how the movie goes rather than just shooting some things or activating a trap on some vampire. With that, let's get to the rating.

Puzzles and Solvability

With some of these cases, the limitations of the format are quite apparent. I've expressed my dislike that in order to win, sometimes it feels like I need to guess where to go to actually be able to get the case before a judge, and sometimes things that seem important are just side steps. That said, I think The Solicitous Solicitor was without any major flaws and was mostly just a case of making sure you don't miss any important keywords in dialog.

Then we get The Bankers Final Debt. To beat the drum once again, if you must make the player look through the newspapers for clues, tell us what today's newspaper is. We've got six of them, that's a lot of work to do. When one is on a fishing expedition like this, that's very helpful. Like, say, if I'm supposed to find correspondence between the principal actors of the murder. This wasn't a great case to begin with, but this puzzle turns what was a knock-off of The Six Napoleons into something a bit more tedious.

I find you guilty of taking your sweet time to get to the point!

Finally, The Thames Murders. It's my own fault for missing that the Bagatelle Club was important and had to go on another newspaper fishing expedition, but I do wonder a little if the game could have made another comment leading there. There are four murders here, and if I'm honest, that makes it very long. Too long. By the time I finally reached the areas which I had missed, I just wanted it to end. It's bad for a game to end on such a note. It also doesn't help that an important factor in winning is something that never happens in the rest of the cases I played, the Irregulars aren't just a score lowering mechanism, they're important to winning the case. Turns out when you turn a bunch of written words to video, you still need to have some written words sometimes. This contributed to my annoyance, which resulted in me taking longer than I should have on the judges questions. But, someone who ends up with one annoyance rather than the two I had would probably have a better time.

A consistent theme across these is that there are usually one final aspect holding you back from reaching the judgement section, usually something that was missed because the player might not have heard some important keyword. I think in contrast to more traditional adventure games, this is more annoying. While pixel hunting and going room to room is hardly fun, going through old video clips is far more time-consuming. Downtime like this, when you're not sure what it is you're supposed to do is never good, but when it's connected to a video, it's just that much longer.

5

Interface and Inventory

You could copy/paste what Joe said about previous games and they would still be true. I will add that I found the whole "newspaper walk" I felt forced to do twice was not enjoyable. That is, going through the newspapers in order to find information required to solve the case that isn't actually told to you. Because the cases rarely state what day it is, which sort of leads to interface annoyance.

4

Story and Setting

To sum up, this time we have a nice mystery case, inferior copy of a canon case, and the long Moriarty-led web of deceit that is the third. The Solicitous Solicitor was overall very well done. Satisfying, easy to follow, and full of intrigue. The Bankers Final Debt, take off the canon aside, is solid but unmemorable, though the antagonist being someone so far removed from the causes of the murder is intriguing. The Thames Murders, while good, suffers from being in a game like this, by the time you reach the end you will have forgotten some of the early stuff.

Nevertheless, I feel as though the limitations of the game's ability to depict its world are showing. Often, we are herded into small rooms of supposedly grand places and it makes it all feel ever so small. But it's not quite enough for me to budge from where I would place it. What is, however, is that this is the final game, a possibility they knew was likely going in, and we get no acknowledgement of this. I'm not asking for some grand ending, just a little bit of acknowledgement that this might be the end.

4

Sound and Graphics

Nothing much has changed since the last game. You still get the incredibly high quality 80p or so video and some decent quality sound, but not much more than that.

6

Environment and Atmosphere

It's very noticeable that places that should be grand old places are just depicted as small corners, or in one case, outdoors areas with suspicious backgrounds. It's noticeable and puts you a little out of the mood. Not that much in the moment for me, but if you have to rewatch something, it starts to become more and more apparent. But I think this was more or less covered with Joe's lower rating for the second game compared to the first.

5

Dialogue and Acting

For the most part, on par with the previous games, but this time around, I find it hard to hear the names of important places sometimes. With no context and having to write it down, I end up with names nowhere near what they should be. De Vries Diamonds was almost impossible for me to hear, I'm not sure how I actually got it down eventually. Little issues pop up all the time like this, which does make me lower it from the previous entries.

6

We've done some rounding from the judges' scores.

 5+4+4+6+5+6=30/0.6=50, 2 points less than the last game. And Michael gets the correct score with 50. With that, I pretty much have all I have to say about this game. Not really that much to say three games in a series with much of the same systems. We will, of course, be seeing more games from the good folks on the development end of this game in Are You Afraid of the Dark: The Tale of Orpheo's Curse and MTV: Club Dead, and I hope Joe will be able to play those when he has more free time again. For me, I have more Dracula...and then Innocent Until Caught.

CAP Distribution

100 CAPs to Morpheus

• Blogger Award - 100 CAPs - For playing Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective: Vol. III for our enjoyment

10 CAPs to Busca

• Speling Award - 10 CAPs - For correcting our highly accurate and flawless grammar.

10 CAPs to Michael

• Psychic Award - 10 CAPs - For correctly predicting the final score of Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective: Vol. III.

10 CAPs to ShaddamIVth

• Teabag Award - 10 CAPs - For the best joke about how bad the tea is at Scotland Yard.

5 CAPs to Vetinari

• Street Smarts Award - 5 CAPs - For getting the question the board game asked about where Holmes first lived in London correct.