Sherlock Holmes - Nemesis

Good vibes but clunky at best

 

All Sherlock Games are incredible. So much fun to play

A classic story of detective and thief rivalry always works and this time, it did a solid one for Sherlock Holmes game. The fact it gives nod to why there is no Sherlock Holmes vs Arsene Lupin in real book is also a chef kiss. The pacing is great (a few callbacks to the previous game which add some flavour to the story), the riddles are challenging, the new quality of life in gameplay and investigating; all of it are an improvement from Awakened Remastered. 10/10 and a must play Sherlock Holmes game.

Bring back Creepy Watson!

tl;dr This game is old, you've been told it's old, don't complain that it's old. It runs just as well as it did back in the day, but you probably should install Directx 9 and whatever Microsoft service packs were around back then. It's difficult if you are impatient and don't want to read the clues and listen to the dialog. Still fun if you are looking for a puzzle game and have the patience for puzzle games.

It's 2008, you are twelve years old. You are at Staples with your father and see this game. By some miracle he buys it for you and you run home to boot up your large beige rectangle with Windows XP. You delete a could Nancy Drew games to make room for it. Two hours later the game is finally ready. You load in and are immediately stumped by the first puzzle. Eventually you manage to stumble your way through the whole game using a walkthrough from a plain HTML website that you printed off your dad's computer when he was sleeping so you wouldn't get in trouble for using the internet and wasting printer ink.

Fast-forward 16 years and you boot it up in 12 seconds, realize that the game now natively supports ultra-wide resolutions without black bars, let's you skip dialog and cutscenes, and has a walkthrough built in that I def could have used as a child. The graphics are pretty good even now, especially when you compare them to some of the more unfortunate releases of this day and age.

The game has actual puzzles, like answering riddles or using the right objects in the right place, and all the answers can be found in game with a bit of reading and thinking. The story is fine and is closer to that of the original Sherlock Holmes novels than that of the more recent games. Less whimsy, more stoic. Less internal reflection, more insulting Watson for being a dummy. It lacks an autosave feature so you should manually save and save often. I haven't had any crashes in this decade, but I do remember losing hours of progress as a child because I had no fear of my own mortality and couldn't be bothered to save.

You can play in first person or even in a classic Resident Evil style if you wanna see how ugly you are. Overall it's a vintage experience that isn't to painful in this day and age.

Doesn't launch no matter what I do.

Quite nice I dare say. What I liked most about this edition in the Frogwares Sherlock Holmes Series are the side-characters. They were really fun! Also, while I liked the theme/genre/whatever of the previous game (the Awakened) more its characters and the locations you went to weren’t as fun/interesting as the ones in this game. Additionally, I found the puzzles in this one much more enjoyable.

Mechanically speaking I have to take a moment to praise the newfound ability to make all interactable objects glow. It helps so much with these games. Because walking to each little thing to see if it’s something that you can interact with gets tiresome. Because then all that you CAN interact with IS necessary. While now, since you can quickly see all that’s interactable, you can add things that you can look at and have Holmes (or Watson/Lestrade) look at it and comment on it while not really having anything to do with the quest. That gives just that little bit more life to the world and its characters.

Yeah, quite happy with this fun little adventure.