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101 of 103 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Complete disappointment, October 11, 2004
Fun:1.0 out of 5 stars
This review is from: Secret of the Silver Earring (CD-ROM)
I am giving this game two stars - one for the graphics and one for the first half of the game. As already mentioned, the graphics in this game rival those of Syberia I and II. The details are incredible: the fine grain of the wood, individual hairs on the characters' heads or the leaves on a tree branch. In addition the colors were rich and vibrant. I was really encouraged by the graphics and the storyline for the first half of the game: A wealthy Englishman is murdered in front of a hundred witnesses at a party being held for his daughter with whom he has been estranged. In fact, the initial suspect is his daughter. In typical adventure gameplay you, as Sherlock Holmes (and occasionally Watson), wander throughout the deceased's house and other locations collecting and examining clues and interviewing witnesses. While collecting evidence Holmes encounters a number of puzzles.
One puzzle involves placing numbered pieces on board resembling a chessboard so that each column and row of numbers adds up to the same total - very logical and easy (although time consuming) game. Another puzzle involves placing animal statues into "Noah's Ark" in the correct order. This is a more difficult puzzle and requires examining a few clues for the answer. However, two other puzzles (a card game and the combination to a safe) made no sense to me even after consulting a walkthrough. But even that wasn't as bad as the puzzles that occur during the second half of the game.
These are timed puzzles. For the first puzzle Holmes has to get from one location to another without being caught by a guard and a watch dog. One problem with the puzzle is that the characters of Holmes, the dog and the guard are only about the size of a gnat, making them almost impossible to distinguish. Another problem was that I could not figure out where Holmes was supposed end up. The only way I could figure out this puzzle was with a walkthrough along with a whole lot of persistence. It had to have taken me a dozen or more attempts to get Holmes where he needed to go without being detected. I found this so frustrating and it made me so angry that the rest of the game was ruined for me. After all, adventure games are supposed to be fun - not make you want to throw your computer out the window (instead I threw my mouse across the room). But wait - once you get Holmes to his destination successfully, and he is done there, there's a similar timed puzzle to get him to a second location without detection.
Then, just as you think (and hope) that this was the last of the timed puzzles, you're stuck with another one. In this puzzle, Holmes goes through a maze set in a forest and then needs to retrace his steps to fetch a pail of water to put out a fire. This wouldn't have been too bad except that Holmes can be very difficult to manipulate at times. Theoretically, the player should just half to click on an icon (a set of footprints) to get Holmes to move. Unfortunately, Holmes doesn't always move when this icon is clicked or the icon doesn't appear at all (or is difficult to locate - a couple of times it is located on Holmes's body). This makes moving Holmes quickly through a maze very frustrating. It took me another dozen or more attempts to accomplish this task (this time I only screamed obscentities at my computer). Even though I was mad, frustrated and disappointed I had to finish the game to find out who the killers are (a few more bodies pile up during the game). Once all the clues are gathered it is time for Holmes to reveal the killers. But instead of a nice tight conclusion Holmes rambles on for at least fifteen minutes - the answer was so convoluted and contrived that I lost interest - even taking a bathroom break, only to come back to find Holmes still going on and on and on.
This is a game I was really looking forward to. The first half of the game was very promising but then it took a dramatic turn for the worse - I cannot recommend it.
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66 of 74 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Not worth the bother, October 15, 2004
Fun:3.0 out of 5 stars
This review is from: Secret of the Silver Earring (CD-ROM)
First a caution: Read the technical specs before you buy! This game requires a specific chip set and WILL NOT RUN without it, a surprisingly advanced requirement for such a low-level game. Check out the technical requirements before you buy!
That being said, don't bother to upgrade your machine to play this game -- it's not really worth it. Gameplay consists of pixel-hunting, running through a set list of questions, and random combinations of inventory items. The plot, such as it is, is confusing and illogical, though the acting is decent. Each chapter ends with a mandatory quiz that's annoyingly difficult; it mainly provides a reason to give up and go play something else.
Would like to see more by these writers, with perhaps a smoother interface and a better plot.
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16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Too convoluted to be entertaining, May 15, 2005
Fun:2.0 out of 5 stars
This review is from: Secret of the Silver Earring (CD-ROM)
Sherlock Holmes and his Boswell, Watson, have been invited to a reception a noted industrialist, Melvyn Bromsby, is giving for his daughter's 18th birthday. Although Holmes hates social engagements of this type, they deicde to stop in on the way to the opera. And a good thing, too! Just as Bromsby starts his speech, a shot rings out and he falls dead. The smoke clears from the doorway from which the shot seems to have come, revealing his daughter! It seems obvious she murdered her father. But has she? Only Sherlock Holmes can put together the evidence and reveal the mystery.
There are three ways of looking at _Secret of the Silver Earring_: as a Sherlock Holmes pastiche, as an adventure game and as a mystery. The first of these is the easiest to deal with: for the most part SotSE is an excellent homage to the world's first consulting detective. The character realizations are pretty good and the dialog is very authentic. The backgrounds--particularly the sitting room at Baker Street--are immediately recognisable. Only a few details detract from the overall impression: Holmes' eyes are the wrong colour, for example.
When it comes to the story, however, SotSE doesn't measure up. There are far too many characters and far too many divergent lines of thought for a real Sherlockian feel. Holmes' best cases really are, when you possess the relevant information, "absurdly simple." This one really isn't. And that gets in the way of its success, both as a mystery and as a game.
For fans of 3rd person adventures with oodles of characters and conversations, SotSE is not without interest. In fact, it starts out quite well, as you go from place to place gathering your evidence. Gameplay is relatively straightforward, with a smart cursor giving you travel, conversation and manipulation options. The one problem is that Holmes (or Watson, who you occasionally play) doesn't always readily respond to your commands. This becomes an issue in the latter portions of the game. Initially, the puzzles are engaging: neither too complex nor too simple, with a balance of inventory and mechanical. Two timed puzzles in the last third of the game, however, are very nearly game stoppers. One, where you must sneak into a building without being caught, is virtually impossible to complete without recourse to a walkthrough. The other, where you must navigate a maze rapidly, would have been less frustrating without the response issue previously mentioned. Because of it I had to repeat the task numerous times and barely succeeded in the end. This puzzle is all the more frustrating because it turns out to have been useless: though ostensibly you're trying to save evidence by quenching a fire before valuable papers burn, when you finally succeed the burnt papers have no value.
At the end of each day you must complete a quiz about the evidence you've gathered in order to proceed. The quizzes themselves are not difficult, although the answers to one or two questions are not crystal clear. But they did not seem to lead you anywhere. Rather than elucidate the mystery, the evidence just becomes more and more cumbersome. I expected, by the end of the game, to have some idea what was going on. And I did manage to peg the main murderer, but it was more by intuition than deduction.
As a mystery, SotSE is not well put together. The game is set up in such a way that I think it would be virtually impossible to come up with the entire solution. In the first place, there are so many characters that you just can't keep track of them, and there is no device within the game to let you do so. A body turns up and seems to have no connection to anything else until the end, when the victim turns out to have been someone you spoke 3 words to on the first day, whose name was never given. Someone turns out to have been someone else, but there's no way to determine this or even any clue that you should. The case hinges on the murderer's having been in a certain country at a certain time, but you never actually get to see the evidence that proves he was there. In a true Holmes story, the detective would at least partially explain things as you went along, or at least make pointed comments. There is some attempt to do this here, but most of the comments are so cryptic as to be no help or so trivial as to be pointless. Or the information you get from them is never entered into evidence at all.
In the end, the solution is expounded in a 15-minute movie that is incredibly hard to follow and just plain boring. I would have liked this game better if you had been able to marshall your facts and come up with a few answers at the end of each day. As it was, there were so many bodies and so much to keep track of that by the end I didn't even care.
I think I got through this game in about 20 hours, taking breaks for a week at a time while I steeled myself to complete the timed puzzles. If you want to play Silver Earring, thnking of it as a piece of interactive fiction rather than a game might help. I think completing a game should leave a person with a feeling of accomplishment, but this one just had me wondering why I bothered.
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