Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened

After a day of hands-on gumshoeing, we turn our magnifying glass to Frogwares' crossover adventure title.

Decrypting codes, solving riddles, and recovering stolen items are all standard affair for the World's Greatest Detective. But human sacrifices? Sadistic cults? Octopus-headed demigods? A tad less frequent, you might say. It may not be canonical, but Holmes encounters each of these horrors in Frogwares' third iteration of its Holmes series, Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened.

Merging two of fiction's time-honored universes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's works combine with Lovecraft's "Call of Cthulu" mythos in The Awakened. It's Cthulu's influence that intrudes upon Holmes' realm -- when you begin the game, Dr. Watson endures a nightmare that foreshadows events to come, but otherwise it seems like an average day for Sherlock, not one about to be undermined by forces unknown. Holmes is running morning errands: there's a pair of books on hold for him down the street at Barnes Bookstore. Exiting the humble confines of 221B Baker St. in first-person, you encounter a newspaper boy on the curb beckoning for passers-by to buy the latest edition. Guiding Holmes with the shooter-derived keyboard and mouse configuration, you approach the boy and click engage a dialogue.

The speech is scripted, meaning you won't choose your questions, but the newsie hands-off one of the dailies and mentions the latest story about a Scandinavian princess. The periodical, holding a handful of readable articles (including one about the coming alignment of stars) is logged in the documents area of your menu, and the line-for-line conversation with the boy now appears under "dialogues" for future inspection. Proceeding at a calm pace down the cobblestone streets (or jogging, with the caps lock key), you turn the corner into Barnes' shop, and the vendor chats you up a bit as Holmes pulls off two books, one on underwater life, and another called "The Desperate Pirate."

Returning back to town, Watson directs you over to Captain Stenwick's home. The statesman's Maori manservant has gone missing, and after a few detailed inquiries to Stenwick and a police officer, Holmes is free to scan the premises. Around back, you enter a workshed, noticing a strange, wavy glyph etched into the dirt floor. Hovering the magnifying glass with the mouse, Holmes also examines a fire pit until he eyes a ball-shaped lump of rock among the ashes. A tap of the mouse button adds it to the inventory, and Holmes notes aloud that he should inspect the item further back at Baker Street.

Turning to leave, Holmes spot some footprints, too. Extending some measuring tape across the mud with a quick click and drag, Holmes can tell the foot's a size seven, but also sees the right shoe is missing a nail. From this, Holmes' initial hypothesis that the servant was abducted is confirmed: the Maori didn't have shoes. Back at Baker, you'll turn to Holmes' chemistry set to analyze the rugged ball you found in the firepit. Cracking it open with the help of some forceps, then lighting the contents on a burner at his desk, Holmes can tell that opium is the mystery substance. A microscope also reveals that a patch of cloth found around Stenwick's estate is of Indian origin. Not native to England, both items point to the nearby dock, and Holmes taxis with Watson to the wharf to investigate further.

In our hands-on time with The Awakened, this was the regimen: gather information from characters in the environment, then traverse the area for enough clues to advance Holmes' conclusions, and the game, to the next chapter segment. In order to progress, though, you'll need to correctly answer a question at the end of each chapter, calling upon the items in your inventory, documents, dialogues with other characters, and the "reports" section of the menu (a list of Holmes' conclusions, essentially) to pass the quiz. It may seem artificial, but think of it as a boss, a gatekeeper between each stage that asks you to flex your deduction muscles beyond clicking on context-sensitive areas of the screen.

The 3-D adventuring makes for a more fluid experience, and we like the lack of load times between buildings and areas, but it also means you'll need to scour every box, broken window, and back door for points of interest, often with a specific item equipped to produce a response. Combing the environment required some patience; though Holmes drops occasional hints at where he should inspect next, the context-sensitive mouse-overs are rarely obvious -- you won't find any sparkly glimmers to give away what to click on. It does help that the settings aren't overwhelmingly large, and Holmes' map lets him quick-travel between a few dotted locations, but The Awakened definitely encourages patience in its play -- something gamers that are used spraying bullets in the first-person will have to adapt to.

There's mini-games of sorts to help break up the investigating, many of which are math- or decoding-based tasks that come later in the game. The first chapter offered the aforementioned chemistry, but the second served a sequence at the wharf where Watson, needing to enter a locked warehouse, combines a rope and hook to unhinge the door, dangling it in real-time through the window. Presentation-wise, The Awakened looked sharp. A few textures seemed uneven, but characters were modeled elegantly in the build we played -- Holmes' lightly grayed hair and pocked skin grants him an air of experience. Animations were articulate too: Holmes might hold a pipe to his mouth while talking, or pinch at his chin to help him ponder. Most importantly, voice-acted accents were authentic, so you won't be rolling your eyes listening to the game's more than 60 characters.

We only had the opportunity to explore two of the title's chapters, but expect to gumshoe your way through New Orleans, Scotland, and Switzerland, at least. The grip of Cthulu's tentacles on Holmes' otherwise-pristine world was just beginning to be revealed through the first hour, and we were told to expect darker and darker content as the game's 10-15 hour campaign went further. Conceptually, we admire Frogwares taking a detour with one of its sequels by integrating Lovecraft's fiction, but The Awakened should deliver a ripe, substantial sleuthing experience that does service to its source material.