I rarely try out a new AAA game these days, but I felt compelled to try out Sherlock Holmes – The Awakened. And I have rarely been so disappointed. The concept is brilliant: a combination of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos, and Doyle’s marvellous detective character. Where did it all go wrong?

In the very beginning, that’s where: there’s a non-skippable prologue.

I sat fuming for the minutes it took the game to finally give me control, and I was not in a pleasant mood by then. Things did not improve after that. Every single dialogue is un-skippable. You have to sit and listen to every single piece of dialogue delivered. I seriously don’t care in the least how important this may be for the story – I want to play fast and get right to the action. (Well, action isn’t the word; you’re mainly running around looking for clues.) If I miss something I can read it later in the journal. You see, there’s a journal in the game where every bit of information is recorded. So WHY THE BLOODY HELL can’t I skip the dialogue – I can read faster than they can speak anyway, so I much prefer to read it in the journal!

The game looks decent enough (and quite pleasant many times); the voice acting is okay; the concept is awesome; the gameplay is interestingly fresh. But I will not accept a game that won’t let me skip cut scenes. All cut scenes. There is not a single case where I accept non-skippable cut scenes or dialogue. Well, to be frank there is one case where it is acceptable: if the game can be run in windowed mode, I can do other things while I listen to the dialogue.

I’ll let you guess twice whether or not The Awakened can be run in windowed mode.

I’m thoroughly disgusted by this lack of attention by the developers; I feel personally insulted that they’ve presented a game I would have loved to play, but made it impossible to endure. One part of me would like to honour their innovativity by playing along – but the biggest part of me wants to chastise their awful design decision. So instead of playing this game I’ll be reading some Neil Gaiman; to be precise I’ll be reading Fragile Things. A short-story collection that – as a coincidence – contains a story named A Study in Emerald that just happens to be an intriguing twist on Sherlock Holmes that includes references to the Cthulhu mythos.

Support Mr. Gaiman today – buy Fragile Things instead of Sherlock Holmes – The Awakened!

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 24th, 2007 at 4:21 pm and is filed under Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.