Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments

Platform: Windows (also on PS4, PS3, XB1, X360)
Release: 2014

I wasn't sure I was going to cover this game, but then I realized that if this had been a Japanese title rather than a European one it would have been a visual novel, in which case I'd write about it without a doubt. As a fan of games and series like Danganronpa, Ace Attorney, and Hotel Dusk: Room 215, I realized that there wasn't much separating Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments from them aside from the fact it's more oriented towards three dimensional exploration and there is no personal story at stake for our main characters.

Rather, it plays like a series of Doyle's short stories, where Holmes is called on to investigate a crime for one reason or another and then he needs to figure out what happened and who did it. In fact, some of the game's mysteries are based on actual stories, though I hadn't read the ones in particular before playing.

Like most games of this type, Crimes and Punishments involves gathering clues and talking to people. And then the player as Holmes assembles all the pieces to arrive at a conclusion. The largest difference between this game and the others I mentioned is that the conclusion is not always clear.

With games like Danganronpa and Ace Attorney, if you're wrong about your conclusion, the fact you are is quickly thrown back in your face. (Or occasionally, if you're two steps ahead, the fact you are not on the same page as the story expects you to be, is what gets thrown back in your face.)

Crimes and Punishments lets you interpret evidence in different ways. Was the culprit skilled or merely lucky? Does the presence of extra water in the blood at the crime scene mean an unusual killing method or is it because the victim was in the steam baths?

Deciding which interpretation to go with is part of the fun, and you can flip suppositions at any time to see if they'll lead to a new conclusion and thus a new avenue of investigation.

The presence of red herrings and multiple suspects also helps muddy the waters. When you can see multiple people with a motive and multiple ways the murder could have happened, that makes it harder to pin down the actual circumstances as they occurred.

I thought the opening case was a particularly good chestnut (and it's one of those pulled directly from Doyle's stories) with multiple suspects, multiple motives, and the lack of a clear smoking gun. But by going through the evidence it was possible to figure out who the murderer logically ought to be, and thereby getting it right.

I enjoyed it, and expected to enjoy the rest of the game as well, but it didn't turn out as pleasant as that.

The second case was too straightforward for my liking. I kept expecting there to be a twist somewhere, but there wasn't. The fourth was even easier than the second, and the sixth was similarly in difficulty, which was a bit disappointing because it was the final one.

The two cases I enjoyed investigating the most are ironically the ones I got wrong. It's perhaps not surprising that I enjoyed them because they were complicated and they made me work. I don't play murder mysteries to have the solution handed to me on a silver platter. However, once I learn the correct answer, I do expect to understand where my reasoning went astray. That's not the case with these two mysteries; neither of which are directly based on a particular Doyle story, so the fault does not lie with the original creator.

Blood Bath is the third case, and it's probably the thorniest one in the bunch in that we have three suspects in a supposedly locked room, one of whom killed a fourth. The murder weapon has disappeared and no one could see more than a foot or two in front of them due to the steam so there are no witnesses. Not only do we need to pin down the culprit, but we need to figure out what the weapon was and how it left.

I really thought on this one, and eventually concluded that it was Mr. Garrow with a silver dagger. Garrow was suffering from hallucinations due to his medication, but he had clearly disposed of a silver object in the brazier in the steam bath, and the amount of recovered silver was exactly the amount needed to produce a replica dagger using a mould from the victim's workplace. I didn't like fingering the mentally ill guy, but he clearly knew a lot about the victim's research, the rituals involved (which included melting down valuables), and was concerned about the worthiness of someone to witness such secrets.

However, the answer was Blinkhorn with an ice dagger.

I didn't like this one because an ice dagger is an impractical weapon (even though, yes, it would disappear in the steam baths). The mould to form the weapon was found at the victim's dig site, which is not close to the bathhouse at all, which means that the culprit would have had to make the dagger and then carry it to the crime scene without anyone noticing and without the ice dagger melting. He could not have discarded the mould after the crime since he and all the other suspects were booked at the scene of the murder.

There was a bottle of champagne in an ice bucket in the changing room of the steam bath, which presumably Blinkhorn used to transport the dagger, but the victim was not killed immediately, which means that the dagger would have been left in the changing room and retrieved later because it would have melted if kept in the steam bath too long. However, opening the noisy doors would have alerted the attendant outside that someone had left the baths. While the attendant did have a twenty minute gap when he was away from his post, there's no way the murderer could have known that opportunity would have existed and they would have known about the noisy door went they went in.

There is some hand waving about the pre-industrial way of making ice cream with ice and salt as a way of allowing an ice dagger to better retain its shape, but really, would ice cream last that long in a sauna? And it still couldn't have lasted all that long because it needed to conveniently vanish by the time the murder is discovered. If was slow melting, then it would have been useless as a weapon by the time the murderer could be assured it would disappear before discovery.

(Aside from that, if the murder was done with the ice dagger, where did the melted silver come from? Everyone stripped down to go in the bath so even if Garrow wanted to melt some other silver as penance he wouldn't have had the opportunity to get any since he was taken directly from the steam bath to the station.)

The fifth case was a similar three suspect set up, but with the twist that the initial primary suspect has an accomplice. This one I messed up largely because I chose to believe Holmes when he told me that a piece of evidence spoke to a particular character being in a specific location for a long time. After all, Holmes is your player character and you presume he's not an idiot, so when he says you don't need to listen to an hour long phonograph because what he's heard is enough to draw a conclusion, there's a tendency to believe him.

Unfortunately, he's wrong. Because I listened to him I picked the only other option available. I didn't really think the person I accused had done it, but there was most likely an accomplice and this guy was the only person left after Holmes's own words provided the actual accomplice with an alibi.

That was a game writing failure.

Without Holmes's interference I would have accused the proper accomplice, so I was really disappointed in that.

I'd say that Crimes and Punishments was fun, but it needed another pass on its most complicated mysteries. The fifth case probably would have been my favorite if Holmes had been more circumspect in his assessment of the phonograph recording, and the third could have been salvaged with an alternative explanation for the melted silver, or if the amount of silver hadn't exactly matched the amount needed to forge a dagger. (Really?)

Because otherwise I enjoyed juggling evidence that required some level of interpretation and not having the clues spoonfed to me. When I started playing this at the end of 2019, I really thought this was going to be in contention for my top three of the year, but it fell short by the end.