Customer Reviews

Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

The beauty: This game has wonderful atmosphere; the water effects are stunning; the actors are good; the story is interesting

The beast: it is so linear it hurts; you can't go ahead and pick up something you know you are going to need; once I typed an answer using the spelling in the clues and it wasn't accepted

I don't mind spending a lot of time solving puzzles; but I do mind spending a lot of time trying to figure out how to tell the game what I want to do. Not that this is new. It was the same in the old text adventures where you were in a maze of twisty passages all alike. Deja vu.

A typical adventure game where as Sherlock Holmes you must pick up various items to solve puzzles, and find clues by looking around the map and clicking on areas where an icon lights up. Like the Longest Journey or Dreamfall, the storyline is more important than gameplay in Sherlock Holmes the Awakened.

For most the game you play as Sherlock Holmes in the late 1890's. The game takes place after Holmes' "death" at the Reichbad Falls, and his later re-apperance. Your task as Holmes seems simple at first. Watson wants you to chat with a patient of his. The patient reveals that his Maori servant has run off and from there the chase is on!

The plot line is a bit complicated but begins to make sense as the game progresses. What is truly interesting is the Cthulhu element to the game! It is well done and suitably mysterious. People with no idea about Lovecraftian lore might in fact be totally baffled by some of the events in the game. For those who are well versed in the Old Ones, the story line is a particular treat with plenty of homages to Lovecraft.

Gameplay is smooth enough but has a few issues. Namley, there is no bobbing as you walk. Much like the old first person shooter games, motion sickness can occur. Most of the puzzles involving objects are easy enough, but at times you need to double back to areas and pick up items you weren't allowed to pick up before. It would have been nicer if the game spared you the doubling back because whenever one gets stuck in the game, they can't help but wonder..."Do I need to go back somewhere?" Usually the answer is "no", but not always. At one point during the game, Holmes has to chase after a thief. It is incredibly anti-climactic because as you chase him, little puzzles occur which slows you down and turns the chase into a slow speed pursuit. And alas a math puzzle shows up. Bravo if you can figure it out without consulting the mighty walkthrough online. The end of the game has a somewhat "rushed" feeling to it, as if the designers simply wanted to wrap things up and be done with it.

Graphics are fine but by no means superb. There are glitches near the end of the game which serve to make the climax a bit choppy. Additionally you need to read journals and books and the font size is quite small.

Sound is fine as well and the dialogue not completely terrible nor the voice acting that bad. Where it is bad, it is at least brief.

The game has a rating of M, and there is no real cause for it. There are some gory segments, but nothing so terrible as to rank a rating of M. Maybe I'm jus de-sensitized?

If you like Cthuhlu, and fear him as you should.... you'll enjoy the plotline of Sherlock Holmes the Awakened. If you like endless puzzles such as Myst, you'll find the game lacking. And if you just like a good mystery, well without Cthuhlu knowledge in your background, you might find yourself scratching your head from time to time.

I paid full price for the game, which I finished in less than a week. So, I overpaid. $25 I'd say would be a fair price, and thats only because I don't want to displease the Great Old Ones.

I really enjoyed this game. I am a frequent PC game player and I can say that this is at the top of my list.

The puzzles were not obscure and nonsensical like many games. I used what I learned from the game and didn't have to rely heavily on "cheat sights" like I have with other games to solve the puzzles.

One glitch is that you have to move just right to go some places.

I really enjoyed the eerie atmosphere and the gore. The graphics are great and the story is easy to follow. Great locations. Quick moving. I recommend this highly if you love a good spooky mystery.

My son bought this for me because I love mystery games. I think he was anticipating something like a creepy Nancy Drew-type game, but the Awakening goes way past creepy.
There are frequent and graphic scenes of torture, mutilation, dismemberment, murder and suicide. Granted, the graphics aren't good enough to make any of this truly frightening, but the ideas introduced turned my stomach a few times. Parts are just gruesome. Toss in alcoholism, prostitution and a passing reference from a madam about Holmes and Watson "giving each other a hand" and it's a game that lives up to its M rating.
Be prepared to work at this game. The puzzles aren't that difficult, but the linear play is infuriating. After spending a great deal of time searching every nook and cranny, you have to go back over the entire scene because you forgot to look at a footprint! It doesn't matter that you've seen four other prints, or that this particular print offers no new information--if you didn't "notice" it, you can't progress in the game.
The nit-picking often distracted me from the storyline. Perhaps this is why the game seemed more like unconnected scenes of gratuitous violence rather than a cohesive story to me. Still, now that I've finished the game and gone over the story details, I have to say that at least 80% of the gore is just that-gratuitous. Ditto with the adult themes.
Holmes and Watson are true to character and I found the acting rather good. It's a shame that they were put into such deplorable circumstances.

I can't believe that they're still making games that are sooooo linear! This is supposed to be Sherlock Holmes, but he can't even get to a bookstore a block away without asking a cop for directions. Basicly, you'll spend most of your time finding clues, then searching about aimlessly for the one thing that will FINALLY trigger the next scene. It took me HOURS just to get Sherlock to go back to his house and run experiments. I measured and re-measured footprints, did everything I could think of and went to 3 cheat sites to finally figure out what the trigger was. Ridiculous that you can't even get a great detective to enter his own home without the dog and pony show. I'm not new to mystery games, and I have never had as much bother and boredom with any as I have with this one.

The graphics are pretty decent, although the townspeople do seem to enjoy walking about in circles.

I enjoyed the Lovecratian themes within the story, and thought the voice acting of Watson and Holmes were great (indeed), but as previous reviewers have commented, the game requires you travel such a narrow path that it's downright distracting, even maddening at times. Pixel hunting, I've heard some call it... I enjoy puzzle games, but I don't enjoy having to figure out how to work the game as whole as a puzzle. Others in this set have commented on this lacking better than me.

It wasn't as fightening or off-putting as I thought it may be. It has an M rating, which is a borderline call, in my opinion. Drop a few of the dead bodies, and it could be a children's game, graphically.

Overall, the game was not that difficult, and had a great Nineteenth Century atmosphere. The creepy Lovecraft themed underworld that the duo uncover is really what compelled me to continue and finish the game. My dissatisfaction with the game is with the suffocatingly linear approach throughout the entire game-- I even had to start over once because I needed an item from a previous chapter and had saved over it... You'd think developers and programmers would be smarter than this by now.

This title comes with copy protection, which prevents the game from running when certain software is installed. After some research I found that while presumably the copy protection conflicts with software that could be using for copying games, in my case it locked the game due to a perfectly legitimate Microsoft application, which I use extensivelly for my work. Had there been a warning about this copy protection schema on the game box, I would have ignored the game, but since I already spent my money on purchasing it I am obliged to rate it as an overpriced coaster.

I love this game! I loved the face-off combination of Sherlock Holmes and the supernatural forces of Cthulu, it's very original. Also, I personally enjoyed the dark subject matter, the gore, and the scenery...it emphasized the pure evil of the enemy and made the story that much spookier. The voice acting was great, the adventure was fun to unravel, and I think the graphics were awesome; the use of an all 3D landscape makes it even more engaging.

There are a few cons, but not enough to turn me off to playing the game again in the future. The background music isn't too great...it's just a bit of ambiance between chapters and during dialog scenes, and nothing much other than that. Also, if you don't really pay attention to all the clues, it's hard to figure out exactly what to do next, especially when you are asked a question by one of the characters and you need to type an answer. I had to use walkthrough websites just to figure out the answers, and it doesn't allow you to opt out and answer later. If you don't answer it at the moment, you're SOL. Another problem is that the controls are a bit hard to figure out -- the best idea would be to customize them as you see fit and really try to get a feel for everything before heading out on the adventure. Lastly, if you don't play it on a computer with 1 gig of ram, it is SLOOOOOOWWW. But most if not all computers come standard with 1 gig of ram now, so it's all good.

Anyway, I highly recommend this game, especially if you're into period games (as this is set in the late 19th c.) and are morbidly curious about the occult. Most gaming website have given it an 8 out of 10 and I would give this a 9. It's a great game for adults and definitely worth the money.

I picked this up as part of a Sherlock Holmes box set, rated E - M. That's an amazing range for a single series, I must say. The other two games in the set are perfectly E rated save the nongraphic murder that is the core of The Secret of the Silver Earring.

The Awakened does a complete 180 and introduces some of the most frightening imagery I've ever seen in a game--and not all of it is graphic. The villains are among the most depraved I've ever seen in any game or movie, and their actions sicken me even long after completing the game. Frankly I'm astonished that the series took this direction.

At the same time, I'm astonished to say that the in-game puzzles are almost completely story-related, which is a refreshing change from the "go into the next room and do a Sudoku" type puzzles that propagate too many point-and-click adventure games. The sole exceptions are the "Tower of Hanoi"-style lock-picking sections (which frustratingly do not explain that the top and bottom slots only hold one digit), the safe-cracking part (solve a logic puzzle), and possibly deciphering Davy's code (solve an even harder logic puzzle). Everything else makes sense from a larger standpoint, even if it might seem difficult to penetrate the logic at first. Luckily, this remastered version includes a built-in walkthrough for help, even if the clues aren't always that clear.

While the remaster isn't perfect--the default settings ran like molasses on my computer to where I had to turn down almost every setting to the minimum to get more than ten frames per second, and I was frustrated by some of the camera angles--as someone who regularly experiences motion sickness while playing first-person games, I appreciate the added third-person perspective option. The cutscenes are comical, with Watson talking to Holmes without pause WHILE EATING BREAKFAST, but on the whole I have to admit I like the game, despite the subject matter and some of the problem sections (a cutscene doesn't activate until Holmes has seen all of the items in a completely different area, which then teleports them to the cutscene area). I will probably never play it again, but I do appreciate having completed it than not.

Being a long-time fan of Sir Arthur Conan Doyule's heroes Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, I had my doubts whether "The Awakened" would even come close to my hopes and expectations, but this game FAR exceeded them.