Sherlock Holmes Chapter One - Season Pass (DLC)

I'll be straight with you: if the base game didn't already hook you, this pass is not going to change your mind. The Season Pass bundles four separate quest packs for Sherlock Holmes Chapter One - Saints and Sinners, Beyond a Joke, Mycroft's Pride, and M for Mystery - and they slot into Frogwares' open-world detective adventure as self-contained side cases rather than any kind of story continuation. They live and breathe inside the same Mediterranean island of Cordona, use the same mind palace deduction mechanics, the same disguise system, and the same moral-verdict framework where you decide how a case closes. If those systems are your comfort zone, the pass delivers more of them cleanly. The problem the pass can't escape is size. Beyond a Joke, the heist-flavored case where young Sherlock tails a brazen thief targeting Cordona's wealthy elite, runs about an hour. Community reaction was polite but underwhelmed - more crackers when you wanted a meal, as one reviewer put it. Mycroft's Pride is the meatier entry: it chains together three full cases - The Rugged Informant, A Rat on a Boat, and Gone Girl - plus a bonus mission, all triggered by postcards that arrive at Stonewood Manor. Saints and Sinners drops Sherlock into a church-versus-state moral tangle that suits the game's better-than-expected writing. M for Mystery rounds out the pass with a focus on a shadowy figure tied to Mycroft's storyline. The quality gap between the slim single-hour drops and the lengthier Mycroft chain is noticeable, and players who burned through the main story before the DLC released ran into a separate headache: the quests don't announce themselves on any map, and finding where each one starts required a trip to the Steam community forums rather than any in-game prompt. Access is also gated behind story progress. Several of the cases require completing the main quest A Gilded Cage first, and the Mycroft chain builds on itself sequentially, so you can't cherry-pick the highlights without putting in the legwork. That's fine design logic for a detective game that rewards patience, but it does mean the pass has low value if you bought it mid-campaign, finished the story, and came back expecting to drop in freely. The base game itself sits at a 77 on Metacritic with a mixed-positive player split, praised for its detective mechanics and writing while criticized for open-world roughness and some technical wobble at launch. The DLC inherits all of that exactly - no new systems, no graphical upgrades, no rethinking of the parts critics found thin. What it gives you is more time with a young Sherlock who actually feels distinctive, more cases where your mind palace pinning and evidence tagging leads somewhere satisfying, and more of Cordona's genuinely handsome visual design. For fans of the base game who want to stay on the island a few more hours, the Mycroft chain alone justifies attention. For everyone else, the value is strictly conditional on how deep the original game already has its hooks in you.

Alex · Scout Team

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