As soon as you like the genre, you will have played or, at least, heard of Sherlock Homes Chapter One, The Sinking City, Devil’s Daughter or Crimes and Punishments, the latest Frogwares games, which in many cases have come out on console and PC (and in some cases, playable on the Steam Deck).
It is a study specialized in adventures, in the strictest sense of the word, insofar as its development usually revolves around gathering information, questioning, finding clues and objects that allow us to create a hypothesis or a line of investigation. .
And that is just what this remake offers for PS5, Nintendo Switch, PC, Xbox Series X | S and Xbox One of the adventure they created in 2008, and which is the third of the nine they have developed to date under the Sherlock Holmes license.
Although the studio is currently affected by the war in Ukraine, and Sherlock Holmes The Awakened will be delayed for a month due to setbacks (maybe in April), from Frogwares they have sent us a new code, so that we can see in first person the advances in graphic and playable matter.
VIDEO
Sherlock Holmes The Awakened – 15 minutes of gameplay in Spanish
On these lines you can see a gameplay that covers a good portion of chapter 3 of the game, in which we sneak into a psychiatric hospital in the swiss alpswhere some completely sane innocents are being hospitalized for a short time later to disappear.
The demo opens with Holmes and Watson creating a short scene to get Holmes inside the hospital, where the investigation actually begins.
Sherlock Holmes The Awakened, adventure in the classic style
As in other adventures and games of a similar nature, the mechanics The mechanics of Sherlock Holmes The Awakened are kept fairly simpleand we move with the left stick and interact with certain points on the stage, either to pick up an object or gather more information.
Thus, we can explore an oven, a small elevator or a work table to identify a series of clues and objects, which will allow us to gather information.
With all these elements, we can put our gray matter to work, and establish relationships that allow us to solve some problems and lock up Thus, with a bottle of sedative, a syringe and a pipe we can improvise a blowgun that allows us to knock down a hospital worker.
Sherlock Holmes The Awakened (3 imágenes)
With the L1/LB and R1/RB buttons we can also activate, respectively, a kind of sonar that allows us to identify the objects and places with which we can interact, while with the second button we can perform a special action, something like “focus “.
It is a rather curious action, which allows us to identify previously unnoticed clues or details, from scratches on the ground to a small cross lost in a pile of straw, and not only that…
At certain points of the complex we will be able to “virtually recreate” what happened previously to reconstruct a hypothesis. It is something that many other games have tried to do, but that Sherlock Holmes The Awakened does it especially well.
You can see it in the video, but here we have to reconstruct the arrival of the disappeared at the hospital, how they were received and treated, being able to choose between different possibilities, until they find the right one.
It is a very visual detail, and that undoubtedly gives it a different air, its own. In addition, the staging is quite correct and far superior to that of the 2008 game, especially in details such as the textures of the cell walls.
There is no shortage of other game mechanics to give greater variety to the developmentwhich range from setting a track on the screen and being able to follow the trail to the already classic minigame to unlock a lock by inserting lockpicks, which we will have to use to make our way in certain segments
Develop in wartime
Like other productions, Sherlock Holmes The Awakened fuses both the style of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s work and that of HP Lovecraft, to produce a disturbing story at times.
Logically, It shows that its origins are in a 2008 gamesince, although the facelift is obvious, it is also true that some of the faces and facial animations are somewhat robotic.
But, even with everything, and even taking into account that it is a study that is working in a war zone, if you like the genre, the result seems to be more than good.
The beta that we have tested does not last more than 40-60 minutes, and it has left us wanting more, to see more situations and levels and, of course, detect more differences with respect to the original game and the new content added.
If nothing goes wrong Sherlock Holmes The Awakened will be available in a couple of monthsand that is great news for fans of adventures, in its most classic conception.
