This time around, Frogwares takes a bit different approach in their Sherlock Holmes series. Instead of having the master sleuth tackling a single case, he is now tasked with solving 6 different cases in an episodic manner. But the stories are not only about the crime, they are about punishment as well, as the title of the game suggests. At the end of each case, you have to make a moral decision of if the crime was such, that the guilty party deserves punishment or if they can be left off the hook. While at times the case might be cut and dry, there are some, which do make you wonder.
The stories presented here are fully about solving the crimes, so you look for clues, interview suspects and victims and then you make your deductions of the events. If you haven't found all the evidence needed, you can even come to a wrong conclusion, thus condemning an innocent party, which gives an interesting twist. You do have an option of reviewing the case before committing to it, so you can correct the mistakes if you want. However, the game does provide an interesting possibility of playing an asshole Holmes, who just likes to throw people in jail, not caring if they actually committed a crime or not and who is more interested in believing he is right rather than being right.
"The Fate of Black Peter" is the first case of the game. Inspector Lestrade asks Holmes and Watson at the murder scene of Peter Carey, a whaling captain also known as Black Peter thanks to his ill-temper. His wife found the man impaled with a whaling harpoon, pinned to a wall. After several twists and turns, Holmes finds the murderer but has to ask if it was actually self-defence or a cold-blooded killing. Peter Carey was a disagreeable man, but did he truly deserve to die because of what he had done?
At the beginning of "Riddle on the Rails", Mycroft, Sherlock's brother asks him to look in the case of the Merry Men, a group of anarchists threatening Great Britain. This is something the detective doesn't want to do, as he sees it as something only helping Mycroft. Instead, he and Watson take a holiday trip out from London, only to end up with a case of a missing train. The train the duo was supposed to take back to London ends up not arriving at all. Luckily for the train company, this is just the kind of a case that makes Holmes purr with pleasure.
"Blood Bath" takes place in the cutthroat world of modern archaeology. A famous archaeologist is killed in a Roman bathhouse just before he was supposed to make a big announcement. Sherlock and Watson have to dig deep to unearth the truth of the matters.
In "The Abbey Grange Affair" sir Eustace Brackenstall is found dead from his house after a suspected burglary. It doesn't take long for Holmes to notice not all is as the lady of the house has initially told to Inspector Lestrade. It seems that a burglary was not a reason why the lord prone to domestic violence met his end.
Stolen exotic flowers take Holmes to Kew Gardens in "Kew Gardens Drama". What begins as a seemingly uninteresting case of theft soon evolves into a murder inquiry, when the duo finds out, that the director of the gardens has just died under suspicious circumstances.
The final case has Holmes helping young Wiggings in proving the innocence of his older brother, who is suspect in a double murder. "A Half a Moon Walk" ties up the case with Merry Men as well, but again, it is up to Holmes to decide how to handle the group of anarchists planning to bring Great Britain to her knees.
The most interesting aspect of Crimes and Punishments is the possibility to come to a wrong conclusion. At times the evidence can point towards several different people and the game does allow you to conclude the cases with a wrong culprit. This by itself is rather refreshing, albeit at times you do have to specifically work towards a wrong answer. Each time you get new clues, you have to connect them together in order to produce evidence trails Holmes can string together in order to form a coherent set of conclusions. The more clues you find, the easier it is to deduce the right course of events.
One new method of figuring out clues is the use of Holmes' imagination to reconstruct events. When this is possible, Holmes can string together the correct order of actions that have taken place at the scene, thus making the matter clearer for himself. Completing these mental gymnastics successfully can provide new lines of inquiry, but on that note, it is a shame, you can't come to the wrong conclusion during these events, as the game just doesn't allow that. There is only one possible solution to these events.
Always observant, Holmes can also quickly examine the people he is talking with. Spotting all the possible clues from their appearance helps him form a better picture of them as well as it at times brings in vital clues he can use in cracking the case. These can help either during the discussions or with him stringing together the correct line of events.
Unlike in the previous games, there are no real inventory puzzles. You do collect items, but those are usually used at Holmes' laboratory table when you need to analyze evidence found from the crime scenes or from the suspects. Scotland Yard is again a familiar location during the game with Lestrade arresting people and allowing Holmes to conduct interviews there as well as check out the evidence collected in the evidence locker. On a couple of occasions, Watson can perform autopsies at the Yard morgue.
Crimes and Punishments can be played on both 1st and 3rd person modes. The 3rd person mode is direct control, so there's no point and click interface like there was in the previous games. Out of these control modes, I do prefer the 1st person mode, as the controls feel snappier and especially turning around in the 3rd person mode is a bit too slow and cumbersome for my tastes. 3rd person mode might be the way to go if you use a controller though.
Concentrating on the crime instead of random puzzles was something that took its first steps on Sherlock Holmes VS Jack the Ripper. It still was more of a mixture of a traditional puzzle game and a detective game, which made it feel a tad uneven. With Crimes and Punishments, almost all notions leaning against puzzles are missing. The only traditional puzzles are the lockpicking scenes, which don't really remind me of lockpicking at all. Instead of trying to find a proper shape for a pick or something similar, you need to arrange a set of cylinders in the right form. As such, these puzzles feel something of a blemish in the game, but as they are easy, and can be skipped if you have no tolerance for them, I don't really mind their existence. Far worse minigame in Crimes and Punishments is an arm-wrestling match you have to partake during the first case. It just isn't fun, but, again, can be skipped.
I know there are people who will disagree with me about this, but Crimes and Punishments was, and is, a huge step in the right direction for Frogwares. They took all that worked in Jack the Ripper and removed almost everything that doesn't directly contribute towards solving the crime at hand. You can always argue, that this makes Crimes and Punishments a tad easy, but it also makes the crimes more enjoyable to solve, as that's where the focus is.
Crimes and Punishments should be available through most digital outlets, so if you want to tackle the world of crime as Sherlock Holmes, it's definitely a worthy title to pick up.
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