Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened (2007)

Really very well done adventure game. Perfect voice acting, exciting puzzles that require logical thinking and overall the game follows the tone of A. C. Doyle's work. However, the Cthullu element could be used in a much better way.

Sherlock Holmes is a legendary character in books and movies. And what about games?I have recently read several adventures of Sherlock in books. And I wanted to immerse himself in London of the 19th century, now already in the game.Although there is a remake of this part, I was still interested in trying to play the **** what you can immediately pay attention to is the characters. The main characters in the game and in the book are very different. In the game, the relationship between Sherlock and Watson is more tense, throughout their lives they behave as colleagues, but not as friends (although their friendship is well described in the books). And Sherlock himself is not like that. Sherlock Holmes in the books is a charismatic aristocrat with his own characteristics and principles. And in the game, all Sherlock's charisma disappears, he becomes an ordinary selfish **** the plot. The very essence of combining detective Sherlock and the mythical creature Cthulhu in one game is strange. But it is implemented not bad. Throughout the story, many details in this investigation are explained to us, and the question of the creature's existence is not given a concrete **** gameplay in this game is also not bad. Basically, this is a normal quest, where you will have several locations during the plot, which you will need to search, create mechanisms in order to move on. But there are several **** everything is too connected on scripts. If you miss a small detail, the scene or dialogue won't start. And again search the entire location for an hour and find the detail you **** conclusion, the game is far not a masterpiece, but it is not a failure. In my opinion, this is a simple average project that differs from the original, but has a not bad plot. Although the game has many disadvantages, if you are familiar with the universe of Sherlock Holmes, then you can try to play this game.

A good adventure game and a very interesting take on a Sherlock Holmes' type of case; the mix with the Cthulhu mythos worked amazingly. However, I found it not to be as good as its sucessor, 'Sherlock Holmes vs Jack the Ripper'. Midway through the game, the actions and the puzzles became mostly sorely unintuitive; in order to interact and/or pick up some objects, you had to perform a specific series of actions, even if you already knew what to do; it was very frustrating. The puzzles in the last part were a mixed bag as well; some of them required mathematical knowledge (which I do not possess), others wanted you to know things I believe you had no way of knowing beforehand or were mentioned way back - such as the symbol of the Old Ones -, and the Scotland map puzzle was absolutely ridiculous; the map was immense and you had to ciick on a VERY specific point in it in order to continue. With the Remastered version came a strategy guide, but I found it to be mostly useless, what with it being awfully vague. It was a shame really, since the ambience, the music, the art and the voice acting were mostly lovely. Although the dark element of the Cthulhu mythos was very welcome and well done, I felt the story could have gone deeper - it felt as if the huge amount of gory and bloody elements were just there to shock.

I must agree with some of the reviews - the puzzles are... well... either too easy (you just follow the plot and do whatever Homes says) or make no sense whatsoever. If you are looking for an adventure where you solve an inventive riddle using your mind - look some place else: this rendition of Holmes has no such puzzles. That said, the game still has some grabbing power - the intermixing of Lovecraft and Conan Doyle is quiet inventive and innovative; the execution of such **** however, suffers from lack of detail and general harmony between the two. Any adventure fan, or Holmes fan, or Lovecraft fan for that matter should definitely try this title considering the fact it is on sale on Steam for 2 bucks or so. But i would definitely not recommend it to an Adventure (Quest) fan of oldschool or newage.

A quick review on this one, because I couldn't bear myself to play the game any further... Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened is very much a game I wanted to love. I wasn't put off by the outdated graphics, so I was expecting solid gameplay, solid voice acting and solid writing to compensate. Sadly, none of that is the case here. I'm a big fan of Sherlock Holmes, (particularly Jeremy Brett Holmes) so I do expect a certain level of a quality when it comes to these games to set them apart. I've tried the other Sherlock Holmes games in the past and found them completely and utterly devoid of essence of what Sherlock Holmes should be. This game does no better, although it does improve on several designs, namely the remastered edition that features a 1st person mode. However the game should be reviewed in its original state. To summarise: Voice Acting - Dreadful. The only decent voice acting that game from this is Watson. Holmes was flat, dry and contained none of the eccentricity that the character should have. It was as if they hired Microsoft Sam to take the part of Holmes in this one. I can't say their support cast were great either. There is one scene in which Holmes is speaking to a (indian?) foreigner in their native language, and it had me in stitches at just how bad it was. I was literally face palming. Theme: I'm a fan of Cthulhu. Not a huge fan, but I've read the books and anything Cthluhu related gets my juices flowing, so this is why I really wanted to like this game. However, since I didn't play the game through its fullest it would be unfair to review it in full on this (despite looking up the plot after). I can say however that from what I played of it, the premise was not exactly subtle, which is a bad thing in my books. Writing: Really bad. Enough sad on this the better I reckon. Setup/Puzzles: The general logical setup had me stumped. Why was Holmes interested in a book on piracy (it has relevance to the plot later, but why at the start?) and fish (again relevance, but much later) at the start... These were books that would be useful later on, but at the very start you acquire them despite not having any need of them. It was nothing but lazy writing and plot setup. I can say the same for a lot of the detective work. I would like to say more but want to avoid spoilers, but I found the whole way they laid out the puzzles as bizarre.