It's Iä, iä, Cthulhu Fatagh, dear Watson.
After a mostly middling, and mostly broken-on modern OS's, The Mystery of the Mummy, and more traditional 3rd person adventure, the Secret of the Silver Earring, Frogwares decided to try something different with their 3rd Sherlock Holmes game. They quite literally did it by turning the game into a real-time 3D title, controlled in a 1st person mode. They discarded the traditional crime mystery for a horror story drawing heavily from the Cthulhu Mythos originally created by H.P. Lovecraft. So while all the usual trappings of any Sherlock story are still present, the story itself takes more macabre tones, even swaying towards the supernatural.
As usual, the story begins at the famed address of 221B Baker Street. Holmes is in tedium, desperately waiting for some grand case to appear. It finally does, when Watson asks him to look into the case of a missing servant of his patients. Soon Holmes finds, that the Maori servant was kidnapped by two men, which ties it to other disappearances of foreign folk living in the area of London. Holmes also concludes that the servant's employer is a despicable human being.
The case takes the dynamic uno with his bumbling chronicler to the docs, from where they find a hidden temple from the bowels of the city. From there, they find the mutilated corpse of an American detective. Holmes also finds traces of opiates and Watson of all people, informs him, that medical institutes are allowed to bring it to the country in abundance. The traces lead to Switzerland. The source of the drugs can be tracked to a mental institution called Black Edelweiss.
In Switzerland, Holmes infiltrates the institute only to learn, that the head doctor Gygax has been up to no good. He's conducted illegal experiments on the patients, even murdering them. There's also evidence of his drug smuggling, human trafficking, and sales of black-market diamonds. A veritable bastion of humanity, by all counts.
The next leg of the investigation lands the duo in New Orleans, from where they find more sinister deeds abound. A local well-to-off man Arneson has gone missing, leaving only signs of a fight at his home. The local constabulary isn't too welcoming either, wanting to tan the British hides with some lead. Finally, from the swamps, the good detective finds another altar, where badly wounded Arneson has been taken. From there, a mysterious book, filled with all kinds of nonsense is found.
The final stop takes place in an old lighthouse in Scotland. There, the main culprits of these heinous crimes are finally apprehended before they can rise the Great Old Ones from their slumber. Of that, Holmes gives very little credence, as he just wants to stop a group of dangerous lunatics. He leaves believing in ancient, monstrous gods to Watson.
I'll tackle the differences between the original and the remastered versions before anything else. The big difference is, that the remastered can be played in a 3rd person mode, which turns the game into a more traditional point-and-click experience. I do prefer the 1st person mode though, as the game just controls better that way. That's the mode it was originally designed around so that probably has something to do with it, but I can see why some would prefer the 3rd person mode. There are also quite a few graphical improvements as well. Finally, the remaster adds an interactive help system, which allows you to get hints about the puzzles you are currently facing.
Sadly enough, the gameplay itself is a bit stiff, no matter in which mode you play. Each time, you enter a scene of a crime, you are more or less forced to comb the surroundings until you have located each and every possible hotspot. You cannot proceed further, even if you already know what you should do if even one important hotspot has been left unclicked. This can turn some scenes into rather tedious hunting experiences, which aren't really helped even by the help system. At times, it's a tad hard to figure out what the game expects you to do, as some important hotspots can open up only after you've clicked some other hotspot elsewhere. Or it expects you to have constructed an inventory puzzle or picked up some easy-to-miss object elsewhere. New Orleans especially suffers from these issues and is, easily, the worst-designed area of the game.
Puzzles are, most of the time, pretty straightforward. One of the nicest elements is the end of the chapter event, where Holmes asks Watson what he thinks is their next goal. Here, you need to type in the answer, and if correct, the game proceeds. This gives some extra incentive for actually reading the documents you find and paying attention to the discussions. As far as I've gathered, the system is also pretty fair in what answers it accepts. You can, for example, type in Swiss instead of Switzerland to get the right answer.
The story doesn't really hold up that well either. While it starts interesting enough, the further the case of emerging fish people goes, the messier it becomes. By New Orleans, the story is already pretty convoluted and the gameplay turns a bit more gimmicky. There's even a poorly designed chase scene in the New Orleans docks when a thief steals Watson's luggage. After I had gotten to the swamps, I was more than ready for the game to just end there, but there was still the Scottish lighthouse ahead. The lighthouse is mostly one, tedious puzzle, where you need to find your way through old pirate caves. After that, there are just the rather anti-climatic end puzzles, where you defeat the baddie of the story, Lord Rochester, who in his insanity, has been funding the Cthulhu cult. I don't really even recall if he was mentioned more than in passing during the game, as the reveal was something of an anti-climax.
I do think, the kind of a game The Awakened wanted to be, had already been done much better in the 1990s by the Tex Murphy series, after it switched from being a 2D game into a 1st person 3D title with FMV cinematics. In Under the Killing Moon and its sequels, the investigation of the scenes felt always much smoother than it does here, a game, that has the benefit of having a far newer engine at its disposal. Still, I do appreciate what Frogwares was trying to do here, despite it's not quite a slam dunk. They did greatly improve from this though, so maybe it was just a learning experience.
I can't, in all good conscience, fully recommend The Awakening. If you do, despite the problems I had with it, get it, it should be available through GOG and Steam. It's probably in other stores as well and should run more than well enough on modern hardware and OS's as well, so, knock yourself out.
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