Lost Cases of Sherlock Holmes PC

This game is set up with a generous sixteen mystery cases. Each one is slightly different. It could be theft, espionage, curses or a  murder. There are about forty different seek and find screens representing the locations in Victorian London.

The story-lines and dialog seem to be written in an authentic sounding Arthur Conan Doyle style. If you have read the Sherlock Holmes stories or seen them on TV then none of this will be new to you. They have used some of the most common stories and used them here.

There are an assortment of puzzles and mini-games which aren’t very original. Most of it takes place within the hidden object screens where you have to search for clues, some of them microscopic. Other clues are hidden inside or behind objects. Many of the things you are supposed to search for, would be impossible to see if you didn’t know they were there.

Then once you’ve done the seek and find screens you go on to these little puzzles to eliminate the suspects. There isn’t any deduction or any real stimulating challenge. So you are never really solving the case.

It’s true that the casual game market is getting saturated by seek and find puzzle games. The Lost Cases of Sherlock Holmes doesn’t measure up to some of the others that I have seen. The closest comparison being Agatha Christie’s Peril at End House . In that game you did get the feeling that there were plot twists and that you eventually figured out the who done it part yourself. That is an important part of making a game that is seek and find, or one that uses the seek and find as one aspect which moves the unveiling of the mystery forward.

Even though some of the clues are interesting to think about, they aren’t very well rendered. Everything looks like cut and paste cut outs. This makes it difficult to find items that were designed at the turn of the last century which most people would not be familiar with. Many of the puzzles are a bit too obscure to really work properly. The puzzle involving the fletchings on arrows for one example.

Items include voodoo dolls, weird looking old fashioned dumbbells, crumpled papers, brushes and quills which are all very difficult to find. One of the worst was when you had to find where a mad woman had scratched her name. In the puzzles where you have to find differences between two similar scenes one above the other, you can just use the magnifying glass to systematically click across the screen to reveal everything. It isn’t that much fun anyways and it can be accomplished quickly with out straining your eyes.

There are many of the seek and find games that do this so much better. I give Lost Cases of Sherlock Holmes a 4 out of 10.

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