Sherlock+Holmes+Crime+and+Punishments



The game I chose for its entertainment value was the PS4 platform of //Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments//. As the player, your identity is Sherlock Holmes in Victorian London. You can vary the camera angles between first person and third person. As Sherlock, you interact with the common Sir Arthur Conan Doyle characters: Doctor Watson, Inspector Lestrade, Wiggins, and Mycroft Holmes. There are a total of six cases to work your way through. As you collect clues, sometimes via completing puzzles, a “deduction space” opens up and you are able to try and connect the clues. Once enough clues are connected, either correctly or incorrectly, you are able to conclude the case and make a moral decision about how to go about the arrest. After each case, you can choose whether or not to check your conclusions and see your possible mistakes.

Since you are playing as Sherlock and solving crimes, the biggest skill I learned was observation and attention to detail. I have always been a detail oriented person but this game brought it to a new level. Some of the puzzles to find clues took lining up images and lines perfectly, not an easy task when some pieces have to be manipulated and rotated to degrees in the tenths. I also had to learn patience and to not give up. Some of the puzzles/challenges offered a skip option, others did not. If you failed one without a skip, you had to keep trying over and over again just to get to the next step. I had to slow myself down and focus on every possible detail there was.



The game taught me mostly via feedback. If a puzzle/challenge was performed incorrectly, I would have to start over, but had the trial-and-error to help complete them within several attempts. There were also occasional guidance icons that would remind me when to use a certain “Sherlock” mode (close detail or determine a timeline). As far as the Learning Principles go, there were quite a few that I caught throughout gameplay. The most notable ones were: practice, probing, and multiple routes. The practice principle is found in the fact that as a player, you had to complete tasks, sometimes repeating the same steps and continuing to practice them over time. I mentioned above that the game provided feedback with a trial-and-error atmosphere for the challenges. The probing principle is evident in this aspect. I would do something, find it didn’t work, think of why it didn’t work, and redo it until completing the task. Multiple routes takes form in various ways throughout //Sherlock//. The player can visit the various related sites in the order they choose and do some tasks in player-decided order. After finding clues, they appear in “deduction space”. In this space, the player can choose how the clues relate to each other and whether or not they are important to the case at hand. The grouping of clues can change the direction of the investigation, therefore providing different routes.



// Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments // has many hits if you search it online. One of the first pages is Wikipedia with information about game play and production. This game has its own official website. Within the official website, there are forums relating to general discussion, technical support, and hints during play. Most of the posts appeared to be within technical support and general discussion. The general discussion posts were mostly about music tracks and voices used for the game. There are also many game review sites that rate the game and post their reflections of it.

Overall, I enjoyed the game. My husband actually “made fun” of me because I played it during practically every moment of free time I had. I have always enjoyed Sherlock Holmes and mystery games. I enjoyed having to look for clues and solve puzzles to have the clues make sense. The controls were easy to learn and made sense once I had the concept(s) down. There were times I would even get frustrated when I couldn’t progress because I had missed one little detail, so I had to slow down and go back with a more focused attention. I also like how I was able to choose the “outcome” of the case by making a moral choice of how to “punish” the accused.

(photo 1: []) (photo 2: []) (photo 3: [])