Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened (Remake)

The world is constantly evolving; all that we know is mutating into something new, and the things that aren’t evolving are falling behind. This was the case with Sherlock Holmes, which had a lot of time without being relevant. So, knowing this, Frogwares decided to create a new game to boost the franchise ruled by Mr. Holmes and Mr. Watson, and that’s why we now have Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened.

Frogwares dusted off its key franchise to create a wonderful graphic adventure filled with puzzles, monsters, and a mystery to solve.

Elementary, My Dear Watson, The Story is Excellent

Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened is a remake of a game of the same name, which was released in 2007. This game’s main feature was the story, which was interesting, and fascinating, and it’s full of references to the legacy of Mr. H.P. Lovecraft.

The thing goes like this: It’s a rainy day in London, the year was 1894, and Sherlock Holmes was bored in his office, waiting for a new case to pop up only for him to get something else to do. That’s when suddenly, a manservant of Captain Stenwick got kidnapped. With nothing else to do, Holmes goes behind the two men who kidnapped the little manservant.

Holmes follows the leads until getting to the docks, where he finds a subterranean temple. There, he finds a corpse used for a ritual. Here’s when things start to get interesting. Little does Holmes know, he finally found the case he was looking for.

Holmes and Watson, Now on HD

This remake is wonderful; the game looks gorgeous and has a dark vibe that will upset you, but in a good way.

The color palette will make you feel like you are freezing, and the only sources of light in the game are small, very deep, and disruptive, so they contrast with the overall darkness of the game. This doesn’t mean the game is poorly illuminated, as you’ll be able to see all the details even in the smallest features, like the textures of Watson’s hat, the flow of the water of the rivers, or the skin blemishes of characters like Dr. Gygax.

But talking about the characters, they now seem a bit out of place; the mouths don’t follow the movements they should follow according to the dialogues, and the overall quality of the faces is below average. This is a problem because this game heavily relies on its graphic quality as it’s a single-player adventure and the gameplay isn’t the focal point of it.

There’s a small FPS drop every time the camera changes its angle, which can make you get out of the immersion this game tries to set you into.

It’s also fair to say that this wonderful world will consume a lot of resources, as the game feels a bit laggy sometimes. This can be a performance issue that can be fixed in the future but, for now, the game needs to run on a powerful PC, otherwise, it’ll lag.

Rate 7/10

This is a very fun game that is worth the shot, and even more if you like investigation games where you have to be attentive to what’s going on on the screen to solve the puzzles ahead of you. The game is beautiful when it comes to setting you in a scene, but it drops the ball whenever it does a close-up of a face, as they feel a bit old and outdated.

Pros and Cons

Pros

• The story is immersive.
• The map visuals are gorgeous and the color scheme of the game is great.

Cons

• Its performance on PC is a bit disappointing, nonetheless, it seems to be more of a problem caused by Unreal Engine’s poor optimization.
• The character design is also disappointing as it doesn’t shine above the environment and is ugly.