Status: Abandoned

Imagine Herlock Sholmes, but somehow even more insufferable, and his sidekick is now a homosexual ghost. Spent half the game chasing an elephant around.

Super boring, too much redundancies, terrible ideas, I don't know what devs even thinking on this game.
They have a character doing finger slap for each scene selection and the animation took like 2 seconds, and there are 27 combination in the very first scene :).
Most of the time I don't know what I'm doing, not because a hard case, it's because this game is stupid.
The MC is a character from a cheap China game, who having a imagination friend. This is not Holmes.
Don't buy this, DD is 10 times better than this.

Storia confusa,simile ad un puzzle e il gioco non ti guida,devi trovare tu la strada per andare avanti,montando i vari pezzi e alla lunga stufa.Potrebbe anche essere interessante,ma il modo in cui è fatto non è divertente.La grafica è fatta bene,ma penso sia l'unica cosa,perchè la trama non prende,la meccanica di gioco è noiosa e ad un certo punto non sai più dove andare .Anche comprandolo in saldo c'è quella sensazione di aver buttato i soldi

A really cool game with a few nice easter eggs. The fight scenes are rather weird and not really good balanced from the mechanics. But all in one really cool. It reminds me much of The Sinking City which i really liked. The stiffness of the movement was not so great, but i new it already from another Frogware game. The game mechanics and the story is really cool and the whole ambience of the game is really to my liking. The main case ending was pretty harsh but the game ending rather weird. I still can highly recommend this game

interesting take on sherlock & john. i like that this is open world, and a lot of the mechanics are interesting and fun, but some of them seem abandoned. several mechanics, (taking photos, the mind palace, etc) were introduced early on but rarely made an appearance late game. overall, worth it on sale

You take role of young Sherlock Holmes wich came on Cordona island to finish unresolved case about his mother. Meawhile he is pulled in by Cordona island's situation and must solve some cases to uncover more truth about his mother.

Game is good and took unique look at Sherlock's childhood, with some new features, overall Frogwares did a good job, but as alway nothing is too perfect and even here can be found some bad things. I would say 7/10 (Didn't finish all activities and DLCs).

+ You are not told if you chose right answer to a case
+ Unique Sherlock's story
+ New or updated features
+ Just loved chemical analysis
+ Better semi-open world

- Jon is after some time very annoying
- Some clues are presented as you can use them, but you actually can't, because oyu miss something else
- Few sound or graphic bugs after longer gameplay
- Didn't like fighting much
- Without DLCs map is kind of big and empty

Gloriously stupid hot trash that I kind of love in spite of itself. I'm a big Sherlock Holmes fan anyway, and I've played all of Frogware's love-letters to the aquiline bad boy (including the stinky hidden object game) so I was really looking forward to Chapter One. While I'm not usually too keen on prequels, the idea of - there is no better way to put it - yassifying one of the most prestigious characters in all literature and turning him into a Hot Topic mental uber-mensch sold me instantly.

And that part of the game is more than delivered on. I can't lie, my favourite part of Chapter One was playing dressup with Sherlock, making him wear a variety of varyingly silly outfits as he accuses various people of heinous crimes. Honestly, there are few experiences funnier than watching an emo Sherlock Holmes comfort a mourning widow whilst dressed as a vampiric ice cream man. Comedy gold.

The rest of Chapter One though? Well... Hm. Yeah it's not great. The biggest problem is pretty clear: The open world. The fictional island of Cordona is a great place to inhabit at first, with surprisingly varied locales, an impressive level of detail and overall stunning visuals. I was reminded of the Witcher 3's Novigrad, which is a pretty high compliment. There's a decent amount of stuff to do as well, a lot of it Ubisoft-style busywork but there's a fair share of actual meaty side cases to dig into. All that said though, why is it here?

At no point in 25 hours of playing could I find a satisfactory answer to that question. Why is Sherlock Holmes: Chapter One open world? As well done and visually appealing that world is, it's not what you come to a Holmes game for, and there are precisely zero dynamic elements to it. Nothing really responds to you or your actions, investigations are more often than not locked off in a separate area and the combat sequences are nothing more than copy-pasted arenas that you initiate with a button press. Outside of a few instances where you have to find a specific type of passer-by who can help you with some piece of evidence, the structure of the game does almost nothing to serve its actual purpose. After about half of the game, it felt more annoying than anything to run back and forth across these unreactive streets to complete repetitive, shallow cases.

Perhaps it doesn't matter so much though, after all, if you have mediocre bread, you can still fill it with delicious cheese. How is Chapter One's proverbial cheese then? Again, a mixed bag. The main story cases are pretty great, with a welcome return to the mind palace clue system of Crimes and Punishment. None of them reach the lofty heights of that game's cases, largely because they're all pretty easy, but they're entertaining enough. The side-cases are incredibly varied in their quality though, with a few feeling almost as in depth as the main cases, but most more closely resembling pointless busywork than anything truly mentally taxing. As with a lot of open-world games, Chapter One suffers from diminishing returns. Many of the side cases are entertaining on the first few goes around, but before long it all starts to blur together. And don't get me started on the combat, Jesus Christ. To write any more than a few sentences about the combat would be to expend more time and effort on it than the developers did, but frankly it's easily skipped and I highly recommend you do.

Only the story remains then, and once again, you guessed, it's a mixed bag. The broad strokes are predictable, melodramatic, pretentious and at times, dull, but despite all that, I found it wholly enjoyable. What counts for Chapter One's main story is basically glessfully nerdy fan-fiction and the passion and love Frogwares holds for this character is obvious in almost all facets of the yarn. Yes most of it is incredibly stupid, but how else can we mash in the fan service?

That sums up the whole of Chapter One for me really. On paper, it's not a great game, hell it's not a good game, but I can't deny I feel incredibly fondly for it. I wouldn't recommend to anyone but the most die hard of Holmes fans who've run out of other adaptations of the character, but if you are such a sycophant as I, you may find yourself smiling as often as I did while playing this beautiful trainwreck.