Sherlock Holmes and The Hound of The Baskervilles

Genre: Graphic Adventure

Players: 1

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Review:

Given the massive popularity of the Sherlock Holmes character, and said character’s public domain status, I have to admit I’m surprised that Ukranian developer and publisher Frogwares seems to have had a near-monopoly on the character for the last few decades. Name an even remotely recent Holmes game and odds are good they’re the ones behind it. So imagine my surprise to find that a game based on what is possibly the most well-known of Holmes’ adventures, while published by Frogwares, was developed by someone else – relative unknown developer Waterlily Games.

This would of course account for why Sherlock Holmes and The Hound of The Baskervilles, released on PC in 2010 and ported to Nintendo Switch in 2022, feels so very different from Frogware’s other games starring the renowned detective. While this is also a Graphic Adventure, it is not a character-driven game, but more of a “point and click”-style game within the genre. In fact, I’d argue that this game has more in common with the works of Artifex Mundi than Frogwares’ own games. Because of this, Sherlock Holmes and The Hound of The Baskervilles tends to feel more like tackling an escape puzzle room than it does solving any sort of mystery.

The story here starts more or less like the classic novella it is titled after, but as soon as you get into the gameplay it becomes increasingly ridiculous, with the Baskerville estate laid out like the mansion from Resident Evil, complete with odd and nonsensical locks that must be solved by arranging puzzle pieces. And while the game does make some attempt to retain the elements of Horror that were present in the original story, once Holmes, Watson, and the Baskerville heir literally travel back in time, with none of them seeming especially shocked by the event, it’s hard to take this game’s story seriously.

For those unfamiliar with the original Holmes stories, know that while they did have scientific inaccuracies (hey, pobody’s nerfect), they were all grounded in reality. And while Hound of the Baskervilles in particular had an appearance of fantasy elements, by the end everything was shown to have a rational explanation. So for this story to start out with an inexplicable time portal sucking the characters into the past, and for them to act like this is all just another day in the life… well, I can see Holmes fans being frustrated with this deviation from not only the original story, but from the consistent themes of the franchise.

Apart from the story deviations, the presentation here definitely shows its age and its low-budget origins. The game’s hand-crafted 2D visuals mostly look decent, but animate extremely poorly, with the game’s characters and their flappy mouths looking particularly shoddy. And while the moody soundtrack works well to set the tone, the voice acting for the characters here is terrible, flat and poorly-acted, to the point where if this game came out more recently, I would have sworn some of the voicework was done by AI, and bad AI at that.

The puzzles here are not worked into the world well, at times nonsensical (seriously, Holmes can’t just pull open curtains, he needs a curtain rope to do it?), with players picking up seemingly useless objects that will surely be needed for future puzzles while refusing to interact with objects that seem like they would be vital for the current situation. There is thankfully a hint system that can point you where you need to go, but it’s frustrating to need to use it this often due to the game’s at-times poor logic and lack of hotspot indicators. The game also has occasional immersion-breaking “hidden object” sections, where you’re trying to locate a list of objects in a static scene.

All of this is controlled via a cursor you move using the gamepad, or you can interact with the screen directly using the touchscreen in portable mode, which is a nice feature to include. In either case, both methods seem to work well enough.

Overall, it’s hard not to be disappointed in Sherlock Holmes and The Hound of The Baskervilles. Some deviations from the original story are perhaps to be expected in a videogame adaptation, but this game goes crazy with those deviations. The characters are flat and poorly-voiced. The gameplay is nonsensical and at times immersion-breaking. It’s hard not to feel like this game is using Sherlock Holmes’ notoriety to attract attention to what is otherwise a pretty sub-par Graphic Adventure. And unless you absolutely need to have every game based on the legendary detective, I think this is one mystery you can leave unsolved. Or, better yet – just read the novella again.

tl;dr – Sherlock Holmes and The Hound of The Baskervilles is a Graphic Adventure that is an extremely loose adaptation of the classic detective story. However, the gameplay here feels less like detective work and more like an escape room, one with poorly thought-out puzzles, jarringly bizarre departures from the original story, and a woefully poor presentation. Unless you’re such a huge Holmes fan that you need to get everything based on the character, this is a game you’re better off not investigating.

Grade: C-

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