Sherlock Holmes and The Hound of The Baskervilles

I went in expecting a casual Holmes romp and got something stranger and more divisive than the title suggests. This is not Frogwares' mainline Sherlock series - it was handled by sub-studio Waterlily Games, and that distinction matters. Where the parent studio builds investigation-heavy adventures around deduction and dialogue, this one sits firmly in hidden-object puzzle territory, closer in feel to Artifex Mundi than to Crimes and Punishments. Think of it as a themed escape room wearing a deerstalker. The core loop is straightforward: move between static locations inside Baskerville Hall and the surrounding moorland, scour scenes for listed items, collect coat-of-arms fragments from seven Baskerville family members, and slot them into portraits in the gallery. Each completed portrait rewards you with a jewel that powers one of five special abilities - Strength, Perception, Materialization, Speed, and Telekinesis - which Holmes then uses to clear obstacles in subsequent rooms. It is a light RPG-adjacent progression system that gives the otherwise routine item-hunting a mild sense of momentum. A fast-travel map highlights locations with pending tasks, which cuts down on the aimless backtracking that plagues the genre. The two difficulty modes adjust hint recharge speed, object highlighting, and puzzle complexity, with hard mode ranging from tile-swap puzzles up to code-deciphering sequences that actually ask something of you. Where the game earns real credit is atmosphere. The art direction leans into rich, deep colour palettes across detailed Victorian rooms - a hidden Frankensteinian laboratory, a druidic ritual site on the moor, insect-filled chambers belonging to an entomologist Baskerville - and the eerie tone holds up surprisingly well for a release of its age. Watson's dialogue gets a few genuinely amusing moments, and the voice work is competent without being a selling point. The music, fair warning, is enthusiastic to the point of overstatement. The weaknesses are real, though. The story hijacks the source material almost immediately, leaning into supernatural elements and a time-travel mechanic - activated by placing crystal eyes into wolf-head sculptures - that lets Holmes witness past murders in ghostly tableau. Doyle purists will find this maddening; Holmes himself keeps insisting there must be a rational explanation right up until the game stops pretending there will be one. The save system has a documented quirk where restarting requires wiping your profile, taking achievements with it. Puzzle pieces occasionally spawn into scenes on repeat visits without warning, which makes the hint system less useful than it should be. At three to five hours depending on difficulty and skips, the runtime is short enough that none of these rough edges derail the experience, but they are worth knowing about. The audience here is clear: hidden-object regulars who want a polished genre entry with a distinctive setting and just enough puzzle variety to stay interesting. If you have never played a HOG before, this is not the ideal introduction - the genre conventions are assumed rather than eased into. If you came hoping for the deductive rigour of Sherlock Holmes Chapter One or Crimes and Punishments, wrong shelf. But taken on its own terms - a short, well-dressed, mildly creepy hidden-object adventure with a wild spin on a classic story - it delivers what it sets out to do.

Alex · Scout Team

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