Microsoft has officially revealed its upcoming Games With Gold offerings for March 2016. These are free games that will be available for Xbox Live Gold subscribers and thanks to Xbox 360 backwards compatibility, Xbox One players essentially have double the number to choose from.

These include Sherlock Holmes: Crimes & Punishments (available on March 1st to 31) and Lords of the Fallen (available from March 16th to April 15th) on the Xbox One. Both games have their share of fans and decent critical acclaim so they’re worth checking out for free.

Meanwhile, Xbox 360 gamers receive Supreme Commander 2 from March 1st to 15th and Borderlands from March 16th to 31st. Borderlands itself is one of the coolest first person shooters ever, even if it’s showing its age next to Borderlands 2 and The Pre-Sequel. Again though, for the small price of nothing, it’s worth a look.

What are your thoughts on next month’s Games With Gold? Let us know in the comments.

Game Overview:

Sherlock Holmes: Crimes & Punishments is an  investigation game set within the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes series, and is being developed by Frogwares and published by Focus Home Interactive. The game is set in 19th Century London and the gameplay involves exploring crime scenes and examining clues.

The game is slated for release on the 30th of September on the PC, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360 and Xbox One.

Check out the video walkthrough of  Sherlock Holmes: Crimes & Punishments  below and let us know if you have any questions in the comments section below.

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That crazy bunch of folks over at Deep Silver are going to be bringing down a storm of pure, unfettered awesome this year when they arrive at EGX, just you mark my words. Mark ’em well.

Taking place at Londons Earls Court over the 25th, 26th, 27th and 28th of September, the UK’s biggest video game show will be graced with Dead Island 2, Escape Dead Island, Metro Redux, Sacred 3 andSherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments when Deep Silver take to the floor with playable Demo’s of all these games. No hand holding guided tours from PR reps here, so rejoice!

Personally I think the most notable attraction of this showing is Dead Island 2, and not just because of that sick trailer. The game will be playable a very long time ahead of its current 2015 release window, so attendees will be some of the lucky few who get to see the game and get their hands on it well before anyone else. Which, like I already said, is awesome. Come and see more Metro Redux in all it’s post apocalyptic glory, come and see Sherlock solve crimes like no other with his unrivalled mind. But most importantly, come and kill Zombies.

• 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.