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Categories: Review
Tags: adventure, jack the ripper, sherlock holmes, xbox 360
Sherlock Holmes vs Jack the Ripper
Developer: Frogwares
Publisher: Focus Home Interactive
Platform: Xbox 360 (also PC)
Released: April 27, 2010
Test Freaks’ Freak Score: 8.1/10Frogwares’ 5th Sherlock Holmes game opens with Holmes’s mind rebelling from the kind of stagnation cured only by a cunning mystery or artificial stimulant. But before Holmes can reach for his seven-percent solution, Dr. Watson reads about a shocking murder in Whitechapel, the first in a series of increasingly brutal homicides pitting Holmes and Watson against the killer known as Jack the Ripper.
Sherlock Holmes vs Jack the Ripper plays like a composite of two games: a standard adventure game and an eerily accurate investigation into the Ripper killings. Arriving in London’s East End, Holmes checks in with the police, but Constable Humphries has misplaced an important pouch. Finley the landlord knows where it is, but he’s being troubled by The Captain. And so on. But just as you feel mired down in the “favor trade,” something connects back to the murder. You’ll hear troublesome rumors about a Dr. Tumblety, meet the disquieting Walter Sickert, or listen to complaints about a “Leather Apron” menacing the local streetwalkers.
And that’s before you hit the first crime scene.
Holmes at the crime scene.
The game maintains a balance between its T-rating and the enormity of the crimes. While you won’t see mutilated corpses, Holmes and Watson work from realistic diagrams and don’t shy away from verbally describing the injuries — especially the displacement of organs. You’ll move your magnifying glass around the crime scene observing blood splatters, noticing items placed around the bodies and taking in the overall environment. Observations are placed on a Deduction Board which acts as a grand logic puzzle. From details like facial bruising, cuts on the neck, and blood on the wall, you’ll determine the killer’s height and handedness, profession and motives. These deductions build on each other and connect to later murders as the Ripper’s spree continues.
Adventure games draw heavily from the mystery genre, but the usual mechanic of collecting inventory items and figuring out where to use them seldom feels like you’re solving a mystery. By the end of Sherlock Holmes vs Jack the Ripper, you’ll feel like you’ve solved a mystery. Beyond the Deduction Board mentioned above, you’ll also plot timelines based on eyewitness testimony — which is often conflicting — conduct experiments and rule out red herrings.
Every possibility must be investigated.
One of the pleasures of the game, beyond the intellectual exercise, is controlling Holmes and Watson (either in first-person or third-person POV) as they get their hands dirty crouching in dark alleys, hacking up pig heads, going under cover in seedy locales. When a traditional adventure puzzle rears its head, it’s almost like a palate cleanser – even if it involves fiddling with a slider puzzle to grab a jewel.
The Xbox 360 version is a port of a 2009 PC game so the graphics haven’t aged, but there are apparent budgetary limitations. Luckily the East End of London lends itself to the Silent Hill method of masking draw distances with fog and the reuse of character models allows for a bustling, living London. That said, environments are downright impressive – authentic details (Cat’s Meat, anyone?) have been captured, making the landscape appropriately filthy – and foreign to our modern eyes. Nighttime sections, where dim alleys are lit only by lone bull’s-eye lantern, are chilling.
A grim waterway.
Less effective are the game’s audio components. The score is serviceable and the ambient noise is effective, but the voice acting can be appalling. The voice actors from previous games reprise their roles as Holmes and Watson, and while Watson is serviceable, I find Holmes to be grating. Many of the other characters simply sound weird. There’s also a discrepancy between the audio and the subtitles, with the subtitles mostly matching the in-game journal. There are some egregious differences, like one character who either bought jewelry from the “black market” or a “black fella,” but mostly it seems like the spoken dialogue cuts British slang.
Rosalind:
I think I would enjoy this, liking both characters and mystery type games. Now, can I talk the hubs into putting it on the Gamefly queue and letting me use the xbox … ?
Kim Woodbridge:
Sounds good – I should actually grab it off the shelf and play it. My brother, who never plays adventure games, really enjoyed it, but he has been on a Sherlock Holmes kick recently.