Sherlock Holmes: The Devil's Daughter

My first hour with The Devil's Daughter felt like exactly what I wanted. You step outside 221B Baker Street into a walkable slice of Victorian London, size up a witness by scanning their posture, worn cuffs, and bloodshot eyes, then drag your observations into a mind palace to chain deductions together. That mechanic - building a logic tree where multiple conclusions are possible and some are genuinely wrong - is the best thing Frogwares does, and it is present and working here. The character observation system from Crimes and Punishments returns with a timed hard mode for players who want more pressure, and the atmosphere of industrial London is carefully constructed. Those are real credits. The problem is what surrounds the detecting. Across five cases - Prey Tell, A Study in Green, Infamy, Chain Reaction, and Fever Dreams - the game keeps interrupting itself with action sequences built around quick-time events. A rough estimate puts the QTE and mini-game load at nearly half the runtime across the middle cases: bar fights, stealth trailing sequences lifted wholesale from a decade-old Assassin's Creed playbook, complete with on-screen COVER prompts, and a detour through a Mayan temple puzzle that has absolutely nothing to do with Victorian crime fiction. These sequences often come with sluggish controls, and while the game technically lets you skip many of them, leaning on that option turns the whole thing into a slightly interactive audiobook. The finale, Fever Dreams, barely qualifies as a full case and wraps the overarching story about Sherlock's adopted daughter Katelyn in a way that will leave players who invested in that thread feeling short-changed. The story underneath the noise is worth something. Katelyn's backstory - she is Moriarty's daughter, raised in secret by Holmes - gives the game a moral edge that the cases themselves mostly sidestep. When the writing leans into it, particularly in how Sherlock processes his own guilt and suspicion toward the mysterious new neighbor Alice, the tone lands. The cases also offer a genuine moral choice at the end of each: you can condemn, absolve, or in some instances let a suspect walk free by your own judgment, and the wrong call is entirely possible. That ambiguity is meaningful and genre-rare. The elephant in every review of this game is Crimes and Punishments. If you have not played that 2014 entry, start there without question - it is sharper, tighter, and does not ask you to survive a bowling minigame to get to the next clue. If you have played it and want more time in the Frogwares Holmes world, Devil's Daughter scratches that itch imperfectly but sincerely. Come in with the right expectations: this is a mid-tier adventure game with one genuinely great mechanic, some atmospheric Victorian set design, five cases of mixed quality, and a story that almost sticks the landing. The 65 Metacritic and Mixed Steam rating are about right.

Alex · Scout Team

Catch-all

Be the first to comment on Sherlock Holmes: The Devil's Daughter.