Sherlock Holmes: Chapter One Review | Not So Elementary

I am a very big fan of Sherlock Holmes and, much like everyone who read the books at a young age, I too went through a phase where I wanted to become a detective. Going as far as designing and laminating my own detective badge (something that appears in Nightmare from the Deep for that very reason) so I could feel as official as I could as I ran around in search of missing cats. That’s why, even though I only played through the first hour or so of Sherlock Holmes: Chapter One when it came out late last year, I knew it was a game I wanted to return to. Now, having finished the game, I can say that Chapter One does a great job at making you feel like Sir Author Conan Doyle’s fictional detective, but in order to experience it, you have to be able to look past the game’s many frustrations.

Chapter One winds the clock back to Sherlock’s younger years, as he returns to the island of Cordona to visit his mother’s grave along with his talkative imaginary friend Jon (without the H). This version of Sherlock doesn’t embody the characteristics that I like in the famous detective’s other iterations, but that’s also sort of the point. He’s still the cocoon that is yet to hatch into the mystery-solving butterfly he’s known to be. This doesn’t change the fact that he can be painfully snarky. And that’s without even taking into account the loudmouth Jon and the little helpful insight he provides to the gameplay experience. This isn’t my first rodeo though, so I adapted. I played the game as an entitled and self-centered white boy, and I gave Jon the ice cream man outfit so even when he complains about me asking yet another NPC the same prompt, he looks like an idiot while doing it.

How Long to Beat says that Sherlock Holmes: Chapter One takes thirteen hours to complete the main story. If you look up a guide, something I had to do a few times due to reasons I will get to, there are only five missions in the main story. I don’t usually talk about pacing, but I want to here because I was not a fan of it. Chapter One is poorly paced as a result of a narrative that rushes things forward and gameplay that slows things down. I thought the game was just getting started when I was almost a third of the way in and what I thought would be a side plot involving an elephant ended up becoming a big chunk of the game’s second act. On top of this, things happen throughout the game in order to progress the plot that don’t make sense logically. At one point a cop says that in order for Sherlock (a total stranger) to access the private Police Archive, he has to get the sketch of a criminal from an old lady. To get that sketch, you have to dress up as the criminal over and over until the old lady says you got it right. After completion, the old lady gives you an old police outfit she has lying around and the cop asks you to be a voluntary policeman. This stuff acts as a way to introduce the player to mechanics, yes, but it also makes the plot feel ridiculous.

Using Sherlock’s own scale for reference, the gameplay in Chapter One fluctuates from Elementary to Undergrad. This is mainly because gameplay here can be broadly classified into two categories: combat and investigation. Let’s start with the simple stuff, Chapter One has disappointingly simple action sequences interlaced in the narrative and they all require you to rinse and repeat the same steps over and over again. Baddies come out in waves and it’s your job to either shoot ‘em down with no regard or aim for their conveniently positioned and glowing weak points in an uninvolved version of bullet time before running up to them to perform a quick time event that doesn’t quite match the discombobulating takedowns of Robert Downy Jr’s Sherlock. The game seems to know all that too because it gives you the option to skip each combat encounter. And perhaps the biggest sin of it all is that no matter what you do, be it kill all the enemies, arrest them, or skip the sequence altogether, the story doesn’t change. The same goes for the skippable chemical analysis puzzles. This begs the question: why are these mechanics in the game in the first place?

Then there’s the other end of the scale, Investigation. And, just like college, it contains some of the best and worst moments you’ll experience in the game. Chapter One borrows a lot of ideas from old-school RPGs, most notably by not holding your hand. The investigation gameplay is a complex system that requires you to have the right piece of evidence pinned while talking to people or exploring crime scenes. When this works well, for a fleeting moment it can really make you feel that you are Sherlock Holmes. Putting pieces of information together and coming to conclusions that sometimes aren’t even explicitly clarified after the fact has the setup for a nice gameplay loop. However, there are a few frustrations here that can end up making it feel monotonous.

For me, the frustrations are both mechanical and theoretical. Mechanically, Chapter One can sometimes feel like the game’s complicated for the sake of being complicated. Take the concentration mode for example. Not only do you have to have the right piece of evidence pinned, but when you see the floating scribble on your screen, simply walking up to it isn’t sufficient. You then have to press R1 to go into concentration mode and then stare at it a bit longer at the right angle to get the relevant information. To me, this does very little past slowing down the process. A similar statement goes for the eavesdropping mechanics, which are entirely trial and error with no real clever deduction involved.

As for the theoretical part, I just find it rather amusing that having a knowledge of evidence isn’t enough to engage in a conversation with someone about it. You have to have the right one pinned and go through an unskippable dialogue exchange before you can change the pinned information and ask again. It’s as if the game is suggesting Sherlock Holmes, the genius detective, can only ever process one piece of evidence at a time. I think that aspect can easily be fixed by allowing players to interact with someone and then giving them a menu to pick what pieces of evidence they want to ask that person about. This is already sort of a feature when you present gathered evidence to certain story characters, and it would not only cut down on dead air in gameplay but would also feel more like a proper interrogation.

The game is also pretty vague, and just like gameplay, that too has its ups and downs. The up is the way the game handles map use. There are no auto waypoints that automatically pop up on your map when you get a new piece of information. Instead, the game requires you to read the evidence carefully and find the mentioned spot on the map using street names and geography. This had me studying a map for the first time since high school and I enjoyed the way it was implemented in the game. However, the down is that it can sometimes be too vague. For example, there’s character customization in Sherlock Holmes, but it actually serves a gameplay function. How you dress impacts the way people speak to you. But it’s sometimes difficult to know exactly what look someone will accept and going through that process can feel less like a detective in disguise and more like a teenager in a fitting room. Moments like this made me finally give up about a third of the way into the game and pull up a guide on the side.

I’ve shared a lot of criticisms of the game so far, and I know I’m not alone in those points, but I think my next point may mark me as an outlier. I rather like the island of Cordona. The not too overwhelmingly sized open world and the fact that the game can look fetchingly nice at times resulted in a map I liked exploring as the storyline unfolded. This isn’t to say I never used fast travel, but I didn’t really get open-world fatigue from walking through Cordona’s narrow streets based on how it looked. In fact, I think Cordona is so nice to explore, I wish the game gave me more meaningful reasons to do it. But, perhaps more importantly, I wish the game’s other mechanics didn’t get repetitive so fast that I wasn’t keen on returning to Cordona after the credits rolled for trophies.

I touched on it a bit above, but visually, Chapter One can look decent. There are some well-detailed areas and Cordona can look pretty as you run through it. However, it can still feel outdated as a whole thanks to stiff animations and rough lip-sync. Though if you’re familiar with games in this slice of the market, or games from Frogwares themselves, these are things you’ve already come to understand and won’t be huge drawbacks. And, I am happy to say that whatever the graphics fall short on, the performances and music make up for. The voice acting in Chapter One is fitting for the core cast, despite the writing, and while I may not be a fan of this Sherlock, I still think he does well with this specific adaptation. As for the music, it’s great. It features a unique mix of instruments and I liked it a lot.

With all that said, Sherlock Holmes: Chapter One is a tough game to recommend to everyone. The sometimes-effective and often-frustrating mechanics and repetitive gameplay loops are a lot to push through, even if it can at times make you feel like Sherlock Holmes in a way few iterations have done before. If you are willing to play the game and push past the frustrations though, you will be rewarded with an intriguing sleuthing experience. If all that sounds good to you, then you can pick up Sherlock Holmes: Chapter One on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch, and PC. A code was provided by the publisher for review.

Because this was the first Frogwares game that I played, I was doing some digging on their website and found out that they are actually doing a Kickstarter right now for a new Sherlock Holmes x Lovecraft mystery game which, given the developer’s project history, should just be called Frogwares: The Game. You can watch the reveal trailer for Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened below and you can click here to view the Kickstarter. If you want to see what I have to say about the best detective game I’ve played this year, then click here to read my review for Lacuna. If you’ve played other Frogwares games in the past and believe it was better than Chapter One, leave me some recommendations below.