Sherlock Holmes: The Mystery of the Mummy

Humble, yet rough start.

Story:

You play as the legendary detective Sherlock Holmes. After the death of Lord Montcalfe his daughter Elisabeth has called in a request to figure out the circumstances of his death, but when you arrive you find that the case is a lot more complicated and sinister than first thought.

The storyline overall is fine enough, but it's rather rough at places. There's generally not much interesting stuff going in the plot until the final few sections of the game when the revelations start creeping in. The first half of the game feels very poorly paced and doesn't do enough to make they mystery entertaining even though it has a really interesting opening level.

Graphics:

The graphics aged about as gracefully as milk left under a radiator. The environments look very rough although there's a good chunk of variety, from personal museums, basements and even tombs. However nothing looks particularly pleasing to look at, there's a lot of blurry environments and the game only manages to run consistently when the resolution is very low which causes the biggest problem in the game which is item hunting.

Many of the items you need to solve puzzles are such small pixels that sometimes finding them is borderline impossible. In one of the levels you need to find a hairpin and because of the blurry textures and how small the item is you can basically walk over it multiple times and not even spot it without a help of a walkthrough.

Audio:

The audio design is also pretty bad, from voice acting to music to other sound effects it's just all pretty bad. I'll begin with voice acting which sort of falls into the so bad it's good territory. The actor for Sherlock tries his best, but definitely fails with some of his lines, everyone else is twenty times worse.

The music is also so obnoxious it actually gave me a headache in the final level and if I ever have to hear the Level 4 music again I think I would rather stab myself in the ears to never have to listen to it ever again, it's that bad. The other sound effects are also very low quality.

Gameplay:

The Mystery of the Mummy is a point and click adventure game where you go around looking for items to solve various puzzles. So just like most puzzle games the saving grace usually falls into the puzzles and well sad to say that this is one bland game in the puzzles department and in many others.

The puzzles themselves are pretty easy for the most part. Usually you will find a place that is missing an item and you need to bring it over to use it. However the real difficulty is the absurd locations for some of the items. Stuff is just randomly tucked away and you have to look through every corner and crack to find stuff you need.

Puzzle design itself is incredibly bad. There's multiple incredibly obnoxious puzzles which took me upwards 30 minutes a piece. There's two picture sliding puzzles which were really bad, but then in the final level there's one puzzle where you have to assemble a picture bit by bit and it's so incredibly annoying which took me forever to do because of the mouse controls.

The way you move around the mansion is awful. You have to place the mouse on the side of the screen where you want the camera to twist and that barely works and then you have to move in really bizarre patterns to even reach a door at the end of a straight hallway, it's just so insanely tedious.

And above all that, the worst thing about the game is the performance and technical issues. It's an old game so modern hardware will have problems, but I've not seen something this bad in forever. I doubt many of you have the patience for this, but it took me an hour to get this game to run and even then I had to invert the mouse which really made certain puzzles absurdly difficult and it crashes after every level which was the icing on the cake. So if you do play this game, save frequently and use multiple slots, cause you can also die.

Verdict:

For the first entry in the series, The Mystery of the Mummy is a rather bland start. It's aged pretty poorly and it's just not really fun to play. The technical issues alone might be a gate not many might want to pass so I'd just recommend to skip to the next game in the series as it's much better.

Final Rating:
2.5/10

Pros:
+ Story is overall very intriguing

Cons:
- Getting this thing to run is a hefty task
- Many puzzles have obnoxious design which takes forever to solve
- Graphics aged pretty poorly
- Horrible voice acting
- The music can drive anyone insane

If you liked this review please consider joining https://steamcommunity.com/groups/completingthebacklog

First thing to say is this game does need a little work to get it running. There are some excellent guides in the steam forums which help with this. I would advise saving often and in multiple slots, especially before a cutscene (where I had my four crashes).

This is the first of Frogwares' Sherlock series and unlike the rest is only first person and lacks Watson.
I did find this to be quite a challenging game. It's a bit of a mixed bag with the puzzles and having played some of the later games you can see they were experimenting with what worked.
Some are very clever and well thought out, but there are a good few that even after resorting to a guide I couldn't figure out why that was the solution. One of the later puzzles is fairly easy to figure out what you need to do but doing it is a slog and you are timed.
The setting of the game is the star. I love exploring a creepy mansion and this one is packed with interesting Egyptian artefacts which often contribute to the puzzles. It all looks great even today with great detail and looking authentic.
The biggest downside to the game is that a lot of it is hunting for objects which don't always stand out from their surroundings. Often you don't know why you need that bottle and not the one next to it but like in a hidden object you trawl the screen waiting for your cursor to change. The fact that the cursor does change save this from being a complete pixel hunt, but one section in a wine cellar tests the patience.
This aspect became much less emphasised in later titles (baring the actual hidden objects games) which I think is the right choice.
The story is interesting and does well to build on the mystery throughout to a very satisfying conclusion.
Holmes explains everything at the end and I will admit although I had figured out the broad strokes I did not pick up on all the implications from the clues, but they were there.

I had a few false starts to get to this game, it is definitely dated and some sections may frustrate as you scour a room looking for an object, or try and solve a puzzle not being aware you are missing an item. But overall I would recommend this game if you are a puzzle fan or a fan of the Sherlock series and want to see the beginnings. This is not the best one so I wouldn't recommend starting here but it is a challenging, entertaining, though rough little game.

6/10

First off, getting this game to run at all, esp on Win10, will have you jumping through hoops. Even if you do get it running, the buggy mouse navigation that you will have to deal with CONSTANTLY is infuriating, let alone the game crashes, especially after cutscenes.

Even ignoring the loads of technical issues, it's not worth playing. This is an adventure game, not a detective game. You'll spend almost all of your time solving weird, often non-sensicle puzzles to open doors/chests, not playing a WHODUNIT. All the old adventure game tropes are there; pixel hunting, sometimes asinine solutions to puzzles, puzzles that are infuriating (the white/black cube puzzle says "Hi,") etc. Navigation is a pain. What you can/cannot interact with feels random. Lack of critical information; ex: One door needs oiled before a key will work, but it gives absolutely no indication of this, only that the door won't open because it's locked.

I could go on and on but there's no point. I get it if you are a Sherlock Holmes fan and want to play through all of the games; that's why I'm here too. But trust me, it isn't worth the aggravation. Just watch someone suffer through this on YouTube.

An interesting story severely hampered by technical problems and some obtuse puzzles

I'll say this right off the bat: I do not recommend this game unless you are extraordinarily patient and forgiving. I finished this game to completion and I enjoyed the story overall, and some of the puzzles were fun, but playing this game in 2020 I encountered some severe technical problems that made actually playing the game a painful chore.

First off, consult this thread for how to properly set-up DxWind to play this game properly, as the included version is old and pretty much broken on Windows 10. The game may launch, but your mouse movement will be all sorts of messed up. Through some tinkering with DxWind you can get the mouse back to being functional, but it will be inverted, and so the linked thread will tell you how to replace the outdated DxWind version included in the Steam install as well as how to import a newer configuration just for this game that will fix the mouse inversion. Unfortunately, this still is not perfect as the game requires you to mouse over left or right, up or down, to look around each room and for some reason you'll hit invisible barriers and will need to constantly move your mouse in the opposite direction and then back again, sometime many times in a row, to reset your mouse movement so that you can properly pan around the rooms.

Now, if you successfully configure the game you're probably asking, how is the gameplay? Well, it's a point & click puzzle game for the most part, although played from a fixed first-person perspective kind of like Myst where you can look 360 degrees around static scenery and then click to shift to a different position in the room. I played in 1280x960 resolution and I could make out text and objects fine for the most part, however some items are very tiny and hard to catch at first glance so it almost becomes like a hidden object game where you're scouring the environment for hot spots where your contextual pointer will change to let you know you can pick-up/manipulate something. Probably the most egregious example is later in the game there's a laboratory with a table in the center, and there's an item you need underneath the table to progress, but there's just a tiny hot spot in the darkness below the table that you have to click to change the perspective so that you look under the table, and this is terribly easy to miss and can lead to frustration. Similarly, toward the end of the game you need to open up various drawers to collect items for what is basically the most difficult puzzle of the game, and there's one set of drawers that have a tiny hot spot on them that I repeatedly missed because I moused over the rest of the drawers and kept missing the hot spot,

As for the puzzles, the ones in the first half of the game are quite enjoyable and are just difficult enough that the clues are simple enough to decipher how to solve the puzzle. In the later half of the game, however, the puzzles become artificially difficult where you'll have time limits set and/or the clues provided in the game stop giving you enough information to decipher the puzzle and so you're forced to try trial and error, which is never fun in a puzzle game. The last two puzzles in particular are so obtuse where you need to collect a bunch of different items and you're given no clues on how to use the items to solve the puzzle, and are no fun at all.

So again I do not recommend this game unless you absolutely want to play Frogwares' first Sherlock Holmes game just to see their humble beginnings. The mystery told is a fun story with a satisfying reveal, but unfortunately this game is just not fun to play.

ever wondered what a Sherlock Holmes themed version of Myst would look like - look no further.
Is it fun? Well...no. It isn't .

take aside the technical issues with the title. The dreadful sound. The horrible voice acting ( I wasn't expecting Jeremy Brett, but this is just grating) and the silly hard puzzles. Silly in that they make little to no sense in context of a Sherlock Holmes mystery and hard in that they are quite hard at times. Frankly you'd be better off play the Professor Layton series. If it is a Sherlock Holmes mystery you want to play, then look at the later entries and give this one a miss.

On Windows 10 the game doesn't even launch, it just crashes at the beginning. Mouse doesn't work, menus don't work. It's just a shambles.

I don't know where to start with this game. Really. Despite that it is quite old, I decided to give it a shot. But, the game is buggy as hell.

First of all if you try to run it as a normal steam game via the client, the mouse cannot be controlled and the game starts in a window.

Second, you can tamper with the DXWND program and get the game to run without a crazy mouse pointer, but it is reversed. Meaning you slide the mouse left, the pointer goes right and down is up.

Third, #2 is easily solved by a program that inverts the mouse before you run the game, so it is normal inside the game, but it is clanky to say the least. It gets stuck, doesn't go to the edges to rotate the camera etc..

I was willing to let go of those 3 bugs and started playing. After some time I finally pass a slider puzzle with the clanky mouse and proceeded to level 3. Then the game crashed with a not responding message. Are you kidding me? That was it. It's outta here. Not worth the time and effort to play this game. Games are supposed to be fun, not making you tired of trying to play them.

0/10. Don't buy.

EDIT:

OK I had to retry and give it another shot. I managed to get past the 3rd level cutscene crash and proceeded fruther. But damn, the game feels too hard to play wtih the bad mouse controlls. Can't the developer please for the love of... correct the controls??? I remember the nonsteam version of old had a properly working mouse! Geez!

Okay, I like Frogwares and I enjoyed their later games but couldn't say the same about this one.

Now I understand the Mystery of the Mummy is old and technically dated and I also know its literally their first game (which is also why I played it) but that doesn't change the fact it's very flawed title in terms of gameplay (and that was probably true even back then). Needlessly dark areas, abundance of timed sequences, invisible items, impossible puzzles and so on... all of this means that even if you try, you'll probably never complete the game without any good walkthrough.

Also need to mention that everything takes place just in one very big house. The story was enjoyable and intriguing at first but soon I began to notice that everything is illogically constructed in a way that puts Sherlock through as many obstacles as possible. And the fact that some puzzles takes needless workarounds through several steps where there could have been much easier solution at hand doesn't help either.

The technical side of the game isn't very good. It can either run sluggishly in the window or crash itself after each story animation on fullscreen. It certainly isn't as bad as it sounds as you'll get used to it pretty fast but it adds to other annoyances you have to face throughout the play.

Now I just noticed this game went free to play some time ago which is probably a good thing. No matter what I wrote before there is still some worth and good detective work hidden somewhere in there and I really can't say I hated all of it. But if you want to spare yourself of frustration play following Frogware titles or watch some youtube walkthroughs instead.

This was an absolute chore to play, even with a walkthrough. I only forced myself to finish it so that I could play through the series in its entirety, and I have a hunch skipping this installment will have zero impact on the rest of the series.

I know this is an early game but it's terrible, the puzzles are so obscure, finding objects is difficult as you literally have to look at your feet and spin around sometimes. It crashes a lot and I couldn't follow the plot, and nor could the characters as a nephew keeps getting referred to as a cousin. I bought this as a collection of Frogware's Sherlock Holmes games because I really enjoyed the Testament of Sherlock Holmes, this one is a complete bust but I hope the others will be better as I get to the later ones.

Sherlock Holmes: the mistery of the mummy * 6/10

+++PROs+++

• STORY. Actually the story is interesting. As you move on you get more and more clues and notes that somehow destroy your certainties and premises. I can't say more to prevent any kind of spoilers but I appreciated the plot. The final scene shows a classic Sherlock moment where he explains all the presents what really happened.
  
• MUSIC. I kind of liked the music you hear in each level, I appreciated the compositions.
  

---CONs---

• GRAPHIC. I know it has its age and it's a simple adventure but I really have to say that the graphic is very very poor and low detailed.
  
• MUSIC & AUDIO. Unfortunately hearing the same music abrutly interrupted then restarting again for the whole level is really alienating. Besides that, some parts have very bad leveled volumes, and sometimes some sound or speeches are clipping. (though this happened rarely. Except for the first music track which crackled every time it finish to play again)
  
• STEAM OVERLAY. Another game that doesn't support the Steam Overlay...
  
• SETTINGS. The game started windowed and there were no options to set, nor for the graphic nor for audio (music, effects and speech levels)
  
• INTERFACE. As a point & click game the interface is very important. Unfortunately the hot zones (zones that change cursor suggesting movement or actions) sometimes are too specific forcing you to search too long through the screen in the direction you want to move to find out later that the hot zone is really limited and lightly dislocated. Besides that, sometimes it's really hard to understand or see items you can pick or interact with. Not to mention a less important but still annoying bug that shows the wrong cursor icon when you interact with items and instead of restoring the defaul icon or changing to another secific one it stays the previous (and now wrong) one.
  
[*] SHERLOCK'S & OTHERS VOICE. Well, it's not really about the voice, nor the accent. Actually it's his tone that doesn't convince me, as sometimes is really too harsh... And also Dr. Watson's voice sounds kind of... a parody...

This game might have been decent in 1995 when I had few gaming choices and didn't mind spending hours walking back and forth clicking random items on any hotspot I could find. (Of course thats only supposing I had already beaten Sam n Max hit the road) It might even have not crashed constantly and I certainly would have had no issue with it not supporting the steam overlay. However I would have expected significantly better in 2002 and since its pretty much 2015 now I would advice all to steer clear.
The puzzles were either the same old or made basically no sense at all and I had to give up and use a walk through to find out there is a secret close up zoom area not marked by anything about 4 pixels wide that you need to click on to find an item under a table that from every other angle is quite clear of stuff. GG, you win devs... I guess.
Story? Its alright I guess. Kind of sparse but as long as you don't mind filling it in with imaginary details its passable.
Audio? Meh, Its got a little of that classic adventure game midi jam but its mostly just annoying and the voice acting is clean but bland. Its like they said here read these and gave no context.

Don't buy it on its own. Probably don't even play it if you buy the bundle. In fact don't buy the bundle at all. Just donate that money to the Ukranian Red Cross.

After playing all of the Sherlock games from 'The Silver Earring' onwards, I wanted to go back right to the beginning and play them all through chronologically before the new one due out this year. I'm giving this one the thumbs down as much as I want it to be a thumbs up because of so many speed humps that actually interrupt the flow of the game. Probably the first thing to mention is the continuous crashing, particularly at the end of cut scenes and chapter ends. MAKE SURE YOU SAVE OFTEN. I cannot reiterate that point enough. Much frustration comes after completing a devilish puzzle to have the game crash and redo it ALL over again. However, these crashes can be overcome with the good ole ESC key, for the most part.
The second most disappointing element is the visuals in relation to the difficulty of the game. I appreciate the age of a game and God knows how many adventure games I have played over the years but to find a hairpin, for example, on a floor that frankly is blurry and the object resembles a smudge is poor form. Being penalised via having to consult a walkthrough so often for locating objects is not on. On the plus side the story is engaging enough to make you restart again and again and finish it but it feels a chore to 'get through'. The voice acting/recording is atrocious (knowing in the future this becomes its' main selling point) and the dialogue itself is poorly written. After almost no interaction with characters the game finishes with a huge cutscene that wraps it all up with way too much assumption and frankly insults the gamer who has been there all the way by solving the whole thing and saying goodnight with silent credits. Fans of the games NEED to play this one to experience the whole saga but this one cannot have it's age to blame because in its era there were many other adventure games that got this formula right with less frustration. Anyways, onto the next game :)

This game hasn't aged well, and I doubt it was ever much fun to begin with. Moving around and picking up evidence is a total pixel hunt, and the game as a whole handles poorly. It's incredibly easy to get stuck because the game wants you to do some random illogical interaction to move on which you usually find by just clicking on everything until something happens. Dying and end of level cutscenes crash the game on windows 7. The voice acting is so bad it's actually pretty funny. The story was almost acceptable, but Holmes' customary explanation of the mystery at the end was badly done and I couldn't understand it. I wouldn't play this unless you really want to beat the whole Holmes series, or you bought the bundle and feel like you might as well try it.

I didn't beat this game, but if I did, I bet I'd be very impressed with myself for the intricate and puzzling puzzles.

I admit that I only got maybe 60% of the game's plot done and then I gave up, because I really suck at some puzzle games, this one definitely killed me.

The writing was great though, and I ended just watching youtube videos of the game online, since I got lazy. But the point and click gameplay first person gameplay isn't impressive or gamechanging.

7.5/10

Edit: Three years later and I decided to actually beat the game myself. Would recommend a walkthrough, lol.

I dont think this was considered good in 2002, which means its definetly not good now. The game is just littered with pointless impossible puzzles that dont make any sense and defy the laws of physics, and when your not doing those you are going on a wonderful pixel hunt with the thing your looking for being a tiny black dot in the bottom of the screen. The world is literally a panorama shot where you 'look around' for things to infuriate you more.

The only way I actually managed to somehow finish this was by watching another person suffer on you-tube as the final puzzle will take around 40mins to solve (Correctly) and the first time you do it correctly it will fail you anyways.

If you are getting the Sherlock Collection (Which I would highly recommend as every other Sherlock game is Fantastic) then by all means give it a go, but as a game by itself.......dont.

Definitely not the best of the lot. Many puzzles lack clues and are not at all logical. The in game voices are stereotypical and even comical, and the game crashes at almost every cut-scene. It's a short game though, and playable with a guide, not bad for a break.

I like the Sherlock Holmes games, but not this one. It's definitely the worst of the bunch.

First of all, you can't change the resolution. The entire game looked blurry. Sherlock's voice acting is passable, but everyone else's is laughably bad. (Also, Sherlock mispronounces "laudanum," which bothers me more than it should.)

This game commits the worst adventure game sins: pixel hunting, puzzles that are either mindless busywork or completely inscrutable, and unintuitive use of inventory items.

The game doesn't explain the rules or objectives of many puzzles. For instance, one puzzle requires you to place exactly four liters of water on a depression. You're not told that's the amount you need, which, considering there's no earthly reason that putting more weight on it wouldn't work, should really be included. One puzzle is a nonogram, something I had never seen before, and the game gave no instructions. The final puzzle is solved by randomly clicking things in your inventory, with no rhyme or reason to why that item should go there.

If you bother to play to the end, you find out that the solution to the mystery doesn't make sense and is about as ridiculous as it could get. My suggestion to anyone interested in the Sherlock Holmes games is to pass on this one and get another.

I picked this game up during a sale awhile ago because the series seemed interesting. I figured I would start at the beginning. On it's own merits though this is a pretty terrible game.

In it's defense it's also a really OLD game. And it's not like it was easier to make them back then either.

A good adventure game should be reasonably intuitive. At some point it's going to degenerate into click everything in your inventory on every object you can, but it doesn't have to be that way all the time.

Mystery of the Mummy on the other hand has objects that are very easy to miss. Sherlock himself would have trouble uncovering the mystery of the missing item in the inventory.

The dialog is so cheesy that I almost want to call it a feature.

At some point I should finish this, but I didn't really feel like it engaged me.

Released back in 2002, Sherlock Holmes: The Mystery of the Mummy hasn't aged well. The pseudo-3D environments having been design for smaller monitor resolutions are pixelated on today's larger and wider resolutions, this results in making the already hidden objects in the game harder to find by being unable to clearly see them. Also it is not stable on modern systems as I had several crash to desktop's while playing the game. Thankfully they are predictable as they usually occurred during cutscenes and with saving before solving a puzzle little progress would be lost. The puzzles in the game are very challenging and added the fact there is timed segments and puzzles that result in Sherlock Holmes death if you get them wrong. This game is a real challenge and should only be reccomended to adventure game fanatics. Everybody else just skip this one and go for the more recent Sherlock Holmes games.