Sherlock Holmes The Awakened

My first instinct when I heard 'Sherlock Holmes versus a Cthulhu cult' was mild skepticism, the kind you get when a franchise tries on a genre skin that feels a size too large. Forty minutes into the Swiss asylum chapter, that skepticism was gone. Frogwares knows exactly what they are doing with this crossover, and the result is a third-person detective adventure that earns its dark tone without abandoning the careful, deliberate puzzle-solving the series is known for. The 2023 version of The Awakened is positioned as a direct sequel to Sherlock Holmes: Chapter One, picking up young Sherlock and a freshly arrived Watson as they investigate a string of mysterious disappearances that begin in Victorian London and sprawl outward through a Swiss psychiatric hospital, the Louisiana bayous, and the Scottish Highlands. The plot starts with what seems like a routine missing-persons case and gradually pulls both characters into the orbit of a Cthulhu-worshipping cult. Crucially, the story is also about trauma: Sherlock's grip on logic is already fragile coming out of Chapter One, and watching an eldritch conspiracy grind that grip even further is more emotionally effective than you might expect from a detective game. Voice actor Alex Jordan does strong work showing a Sherlock who cycles between arrogant certainty and genuine psychological fracture. The core gameplay loop carries over the evidence-folder system from Chapter One. You gather clues at crime scenes, interrogate NPCs, and then pin specific pieces of evidence to unlock new lines of inquiry. The Mind Palace sequences ask you to chain deductions together, and the Imagination mode lets you reconstruct crime scenes node by node. Neither system holds your hand. Pinning the wrong piece of evidence to progress an NPC conversation can send you on a frustrating loop, and the investigative focus mode, activated with a shoulder button to highlight areas of interest, is not always easy to spot. Veterans of Chapter One will adjust quickly; newcomers may need a few restarts before the logic of the evidence folder clicks. The clunky combat from Chapter One has been removed entirely, which is the right call. Watson also becomes playable in a handful of chapters, offering a grounded counterpoint to Sherlock's increasingly erratic perspective. Where the game stumbles is pacing. The Lovecraftian sections are genuinely tense and inventive, but a few mid-game cases that pull away from the cult investigation feel noticeably flatter by comparison. The presentation can also be uneven: some reviewers flagged technical roughness at launch, and the Lovecraftian atmosphere, while well-incorporated, never quite reaches the full horror crescendo the premise promises. If you want full cosmic dread delivered at maximum volume, this is not that game. What it does deliver is a focused, well-written detective story that treats its crossover concept seriously rather than as a marketing hook. If you skipped Chapter One entirely, you can still follow the plot, but you will miss meaningful context about why Sherlock behaves the way he does. Playing them in order is worth the investment. For anyone who liked Chapter One but wanted tighter chapter structure and less open-world wandering, The Awakened is the better fit: smaller maps, sharper storytelling, and a case that builds steadily toward a satisfying conclusion.

Alex · Scout Team

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