Let’s make it absolutely clear from the start that the only
reason I played Sherlock Holmes: Crimes
and Punishments was because it was free on PlayStation Plus. Had I been
inclined to purchase this videogame with my own money I certainly wouldn’t have
gone for the PS3 version seeing as it performs like total garbage. That might
seem like the jerkish way to start off a review, but technical complaints are
the most boring kind so I wanted it out of the way as soon as possible. Just to
say, I did notice, because it’s impossible to ignore, this game runs like
complete shit.
Anyway, something that does interest me is the world of
murder-mystery fiction, so regardless of reputation if a videogame with the
“Sherlock Holmes” branding falls into my lap for free I’m going to give it a
go. Of course, I say “branding”, but Sherlock Holmes is a public domain
character free to use by anyone, so McDonalds could call those crayon mazes kids
get with Happy Meals “Sherlock Holmes and
the Hamburglar’s Smuggling Route” and no-one could call the cops on them.
In other words, no-one’s enforcing standards here and nobody had to break out
the chequebook to make it happen in the first place, so you could be getting
yourself into anything.
Still, I have faith in projects such as Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments for two reasons: 1)
murder-mystery fiction is near objectively great, even the absolute worst IQ
lowering episode of CSI can get your
brain to limp along with it for 45 minutes simply via the appeal of “maybe it
was that guy, or he was working with
that other guy!” regardless of how unsatisfying the actual conclusion might be.
2) The concept of the Sherlock Holmes character has tons of appeal built
straight into it that’s hard to completely screw up.
I’d go so far as to describe the character of Sherlock
Holmes as a power fantasy (Disclaimer: this is not a criticism). Here in the
West we embrace the idea that being more intelligent that others makes us
superior human beings, and although this is somewhat gross, it is highly
ingrained into our culture and language. Even if you’re consciously aware of
the issue of this it’s still difficult to avoid, I couldn’t think of a snappier
way to take a slight dig at CSI than
a gag about how its badness lowered
intelligence. It’s something that’s difficult to unlearn, but it does
create this fantasy where people want to be the smartest person in the room.
That’s where the appeal of Holmes comes in, he can walk into any room, tell you
your entire life story from your bowtie and stun people into babbling
incoherence just via his sheer brilliance. He’s also sort of a jerk and a
weirdo, making him enough of an outsider to society where he transcends life’s
petty annoyances (like sex) but also establishing that deep down somewhere he
has a heart so we know he’s not a complete psychopath. He uses his intelligence
regularly to show how he’s superior to other people, but it’s usually at the
expense of the police (establishment) or murderers as opposed to the disabled
or uneducated, so we don’t get too down about it. Also he punches people.
Sometimes I wonder if it’s even possible to make a truly
great Sherlock Holmes videogame, there’s all sorts of issues with it. Problem
one is that the “Science of Deduction” is, and always has been, complete
nonsense. Which is fine! Fiction can have a lot of fun with that sort of thing
and most of the good Holmes adaptions do, but trying to translate that into a
videogame probably means a weird adventure game puzzle where you have to
follower a designer’s path of logic to one determined conclusion. Crimes and Punishments cops out on this
but having you deduce character’s profiles by scrolling the cursor over their
body and then the game does all the work for you, it’s little more than a cute
visual gimmick.
The second problem is a deeper more form based one, where by
virtue of being a videogame you have to give the player some essence of
control, and videogame players are not Sherlock Holmes. There you have the
internal conflict that a game where you play as Sherlock Holmes might come with
the unspoken obligation to make the player “feel” like Sherlock Holmes. So what
do you do then? Either you make the puzzles extremely difficult and leave a
significant portion of your audience in the dust, or you make your puzzles
“accessible” so that players might “feel smarter”. Look, puzzles shouldn’t be
hostile towards the player, and asking them to solve something without clear
instruction and/or context for what they’re actually doing is an unforgivable
sin that will achieve nothing other than triple the hits of your game’s GameFAQs page. Still, puzzles shouldn’t cater to the player, as in they
shouldn’t exist purely to serve their ego. If you present me with a locked
door, then immediately had me a key, I don’t feel smart because I unlocked the
door, I just think “WHY WAS THE DOOR LOCKED?!”
So there’s your two options, both inherently and perhaps
fatally flawed on their own merits, and finding some kind of balance between
the two nearly impossible. It’s times like this where I wonder if those Professor Layton games are onto
something with their decision to have all the puzzles in the game have next to
nothing to do with anything. You basically lead the Professor around to where
he needs to get to next in order to advance the story, and later on he’ll
figure out all the mysteries by himself but in exchange hand you one of those
McDonald’s Happy Meal maps to work on while he does it. This might be as close
as we ever get to a true Holmes in videogame fiction.
Sherlock Holmes: Crimes
and Punishments on the other hand, is here to serve you. It’ll let you
choose the (usually obvious) murderer and what to do with them, but other than
that it’ll happily handle most of the work of the investigation for you. You
have “Holmes abilities” and certain places to go at certain times, but the game
flat out tells you with visual prompts when to use them so that no man is left
behind. There’s weird little experiment, logic and puzzle minigames to take
care off, but you can skip them entirely with a tap of the select button if you
don’t want to do them. And boy, did I not want to do them any more when the
game shoved that lockpicking minigame in my face for the fourth time within an
hour. It’s possibly the worst sin a game like this can make, I find myself
skipping puzzles immediately because I don’t
care.
Something I do like however is the deduction board, the game
will handily note down any clues you come across in your investigation
(sometimes there’s a lot of them!), then you can mash these clues together to
make deductions. There’s no punishment for getting them wrong, and absolutely
nothing to discourage you from simply smashing every combination together until
they work, but I found myself not doing that more often than not and actually
trying to solve the case so we can still chalk this in the “success” column.
Once you’ve made deductions, they appear on a grid and link together to map out
a wider understanding of the case, sometimes you can interpret deductions
differently and form multiple conclusions off the same bits of information,
which is pretty neat!
All of this does a decent job of scratching my brain in the
places where I’m liable to be itchy during this sort of thing. I can’t say I’m
engaged however, my brain is active but only in a “30-year old businessman
solving a Sudoku puzzle on the train” sort of way. Crimes and Punishments feels distinctly flat, and we need to go
deeper here to explain why.
Look up to three paragraphs ago you’ll notice the words
“choose the murderer and what to do with them”, the second part of that
statement was probably confusing if you’ve not played the game. You see, Crimes and Punishments has one of those
binary moral choice systems sewn grossly onto its undercarriage, something I
thought gaming was growing out of by now. Binary moral choice systems are
garbage, a fatal blow to any argument that might try to convince anyone that
videogames are “more sophisticated” these days, and the ones in Crimes and Punishments might be the most
misguided I’ve ever seen. After picking the murderer (I got it right in all six
cases for the record, I’m not sure what happens if you get it wrong because I’m
too cool for that) you are offered a choice between “absolving” or “condemning”
the criminal. “Absolving” usually means some act of compassion, which sometimes
means lying to the police and excusing them of their crime entirely. “Condemning”
means just that, and to quote the game itself verbatim; “they deserve the
rope.”
I’m not going to get into a long tangent about how utterly
ridiculous I think it is that this a moral choice forced upon Sherlock Holmes in all six cases of this game, a guy
who solves puzzles for fun and cares more about his ego and his work more than
politics or most living people. What I am going to get into however, is Crimes and Punishments’ weird morals and
flat fiction. In all six cases, the victim turns out to be some horrible person
who probably deserved to die, probably because this is the easiest way to
contrive reasons for every other person in the story to have a reason to murder
them. Well, in the second case you don’t realise it’s a murder case until near
the end, and even then the victims are a bunch of Chileans who you never see or
talk to who are implied to have also done some terrible things. In any case,
this is still pretty lazy, and leaves us with no connection to the victim or
indeed any of the characters. It leaves the entire affair in its rawest form; a
puzzle. Which I suppose is how Sherlock Holmes would see things, but that makes
it all the more bizarre to throw in the morals at the end.
It’s honestly sort of creepy how this game views 5 out of
its 6 suspects as worthy of absolving, regardless of the brutality of its crime
or how selfish the intentions were. One case involves Holmes forgiving a guy
who killed another guy because he was taking credit for a sword that the
murderer found, I mean what? The game seriously expects you to accept that
murder isn’t that much of a big deal on the grounds that the victim was sort of
a dirtbag and I don’t like it! Please don’t show me your game’s heart if it’s
this twisted and confused, just let Lestrad take the guy away in chains and let
me think about it. If you’re wondering how I seem to be similar with the
content of both choices, it’s because the game allows you to watch your ending
and then change it if you don’t like it. So what’s even the point of the choice?
L.A. Noire made you feel like dirt
when you made a bad decision at the end of a case, sure that was mostly because
of bad design on the game’s part which was frustrating, but at least you felt something. All Crimes and Punishments feels like is reading two copies of the
same Choose-Your –Own-Adventure book at once.
This really is the death blow as far as this game is
concerned, there’s no fun or feeling in anything. The characters are
deliberately left lifeless shells so that you can force your own humanity and
morals onto them in one meaningless choice of ending cutscenes. Sometimes the
game tries to have jokes, but the voice acting is so flat and the animation too
limited for me to even notice them until 15 seconds after the punchline’s
missed. Note earlier how I said “5 out of 6 criminals can be absolved”, well
the one who can’t is one of only 2 non-white characters in the game. The other
non-white character is a “comedy” Asian stereotype, while the murderer in the
second case is a Mexican who smokes cigars who literally has no name other than
“The Mexican”. Neither of these characters are given real names. For god’s
sake, at least have some fun with your fiction, I’m not saying I would excuse
the casual racism but I would at least have some grains of respect for you if I
believed you were trying. Two of the
six cases are shamelessly near identical, and the only one that even attempts
to turn into a Sherlock Holmes style adventure story bogs itself down in awful
adventure game and illogical valve turning puzzles. Then after six cases and
about 12 hours it ends on a whimper with some barely mentioned terrorist plot
being solved in one scene by one more silly moral choice.
At times Sherlock
Holmes: Crimes and Punishments is
decent enough brain food for people who like this sort of thing, but it only
seems to be starring Sherlock Holmes because calling the game Barry McKnowitall: Jerk Detective
Extraordinaire probably would have lowered sales. The only time this game
appeared to show any signs of personality whatsoever was whenever the textures
wouldn’t load in and Holmes walked around with a puffy monster face. There
might be some decent puzzle designers working under the hood here, but they
express no love for Holmes or his hyperbole, and not really for humanity
either. What you’re left with is a detective adventure game where you play some
jerk who wishes he was Sherlock Holmes, and believe me I don’t need a videogame
to experience that.
