Sherlock Holmes: Crimes & Punishments Wiki – Everything you need to know about the game

Sherlock Holmes: Crimes & Punishments is an upcoming adventure investigation / puzzle game based in the “Adventures of Sherlock Holmes” (an award winning video game series that began in 2002) that is currently in development by Frogwares (Sherlock Holmes: mystery of the mummy and Dracula: Origin) and set to be published by Focus Home Interactive (Bound by Flame and Space Hulk: Deathwing). The game, which will be running on Unreal Engine 3 is set to release in September 2014 on both current and last generation systems. Sherlock Holmes: Crimes & Punishments is set to launch on Microsoft Windows, Xbox 360, Xbox One, PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4.

• 1. Development
• 2. Gameplay
• 3. Story
• 4. Characters

Development

Development of  Sherlock Holmes: Crimes & Punishments is rather similar to that of the previous Sherlock Holmes games to come out of Frogwares. One of the key changes that won’t affect the gameplay is the decision to switch over to the Unreal Engine, specifically Unreal Engine 3. This change will allow Crimes and Punishments to leap ahead of its predecessors in terms of graphical fidelity. The second change that will impact the visuals of the game and the gameplay is that Frogwares will be removing their older method of employing textures (using one large texture rather than individual tiles) and replacing it with a more conventional method that will see improved details.

This will impact gameplay because, “Your garment can play a malicious trick betraying all the details on you to someone sharp-eyed. This is why we pay a lot of attention to the clothing of our characters,” says Frogwares. Other than the above mentioned information, most of the other changes that have been announced are primarily cosmetic in nature; better particle effects, smoother animations and enhanced post processing. 

Gameplay

The game can be played in two separate camera perspectives, first person and third person views can be used to help solve crimes as clues are often well hidden or hard to spot. Not hard to spot in a frustrating way it must be said, hard to spot because as with many real world crimes, even the most ordinary object can be a clue.

Like the Sherlock Holmes games that have come before it, Sherlock Holmes: Crimes & Punishments is at its core a game about investigation and puzzle solving. Players will examine crime scenes and suspicious areas of the game world in order to find clues and uncover their relevance to the crime in question.

As clues are uncovered they are added to a “deduction board” which will allow them to better link the clues together (see Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows act 1 for a better visual representation) that will in turn lead to a full branch of clues linked together. Once this is done the player can interpret the clues as they see fit and can use their own internal reasoning to decide which of the available deductions best suits their final conclusion. This of course leads to a scenario wherein the player can lose purely because their logic was flawed and their deductive reasoning was off, keeping very close to the reality of crime solving in Sherlock’s time period.

Cases that are undertaken by the player will generally have a number of choices to be made which are related to a moral choice system, further impacting the gameplay. Olga Ryzhko, a developer of the game said that their aim to immerse the players into the game and not to play aside Sherlock Holmes but to truly be him.

Recently, Sherlock Holmes made the jump to the BBC with Sherlock being portrayed by award winning actor, Benedict Cumberbatch. Sherlock’s thought process is often shown on screen by a white text overlay that hangs over times of interest. This has been an influential part of the direction this game is taking, “We find inspiration in [the BBC] series, we definitely do. That’s probably one of the reasons we’re making the series more dynamic and modern.” 

Story

While there isn’t much known about how the plot will directly unfold in the game, we do know that the game is similar to Crime and Punishment, a Russian Novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky which focuses on finding who is the criminal and making the moral decision of either absolving them, or condemning them for their crimes. Other aspects of the game are inspired a number of the original stories penned by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes.

Characters

Similar to the story, we don’t know much about the characters in the game. While Sherlock is a sure fire character set to return, we don’t know about others.

Sherlock Holmes – Sherlock Holmes is a fictional detective with an uncanny knack for solving crimes that others would consider impossible, this has earned him a grand reputation.

John Watson (unconfirmed) – Dr. John H. Watson is an assistant and close personal friend of Sherlock Holmes. The duo often bounce theories of each other which spawned the saying, “Elementary my dear Watson”.

Note: This wiki will be updated once we have more information about the game.