The Testament of Sherlock Holmes

My first hour with The Testament of Sherlock Holmes caught me completely off guard. I expected a cosy Victorian whodunit. What I got was Holmes picking up a severed thumb at a mutilated priest's crime scene, then casually attempting to shoot an unarmed suspect before Watson intervened. This is the darkest entry Frogwares produced in their long-running series, and that tonal commitment is exactly what makes it worth your time if you can stomach it. Mechanically it sits at the heavier end of the point-and-click adventure spectrum. You switch control between Holmes, Watson, and occasionally a bloodhound, exploring locations like Whitechapel back alleys, Kensington Gardens, and a sawmill hiding Russian anarchists. Interaction points are flagged by a magnifying-glass cursor, and a cooldown-gated "sixth sense" ability briefly highlights every active hotspot in your field of view, which keeps pixel-hunting frustration to a minimum most of the time. Clues you gather feed into a deduction board where you link pieces of evidence and pick from branching hypotheses to unlock the next story beat. It's a satisfying loop when it clicks. When it doesn't, you may end up cycling through option combinations rather than actually deducing, which is the system's biggest weakness. Puzzles are dense and varied - lockboxes, circuit boards, Fibonacci sequences, chemistry analysis - so much so that the game sometimes feels like a puzzle compilation held together by dialogue. Whether that's a selling point or a warning depends entirely on you. The camera system offers three perspectives: first-person, over-the-shoulder third-person, and a static isometric view (mouse and keyboard only). None of them are perfect. Third-person uses tank controls that take a beat to respond, which feels clunky in 2025 terms. First-person is actually the more practical option for detailed examination and is where the game is clearest about what you can interact with. The voice acting, modelled loosely on the Jeremy Brett era of Holmes, is genuinely strong. Holmes is cold, calculating, and increasingly indefensible - Watson's growing horror at his partner's behaviour forms the emotional core of the whole story, and it lands. The script is the best thing here. Side characters and minor NPCs have noticeably weaker animation and modelling, which is a product of the 2012 budget rather than carelessness. Runtime lands around ten to fifteen hours depending on puzzle tolerance and whether you use the built-in skip option on the harder mini-games. The story's first half is a little scattered, with multiple plot threads running in parallel before converging, but the back half tightens up considerably and the finale pulls its threads together in a way that respects your time. There is a noted crash issue on some modern systems, fixable via a 4GB memory patch documented in the Steam community - worth knowing before you buy. This is not the game for players who need snappy controls, modern production values, or a lighter mystery tone. It is absolutely the game for adventure fans who want a proper adult detective story with a puzzle density that demands attention. The deduction board and sixth-sense mechanics would be refined in later Frogwares titles, but in rough form they already feel like the right direction for the genre.

Alex · Scout Team

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