#542: Sherlock Holmes: Chapter One
Every story has to start somewhere — even that of the World’s Greatest Detective
Initial release: November 16, 2021
Platforms: PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, XBox Series X/S
Developer: Frogwares
Around five years ago I reviewed Frogwares’ The Sinking City. Up to that point I had never played a Frogwares game, and I was in a different stage in my life, so I was pretty brutal in my assessment of the game. While I still stand by my opinion about how the game handled racial matters, I’ve admittedly softened somewhat on the broader mystery-solving system, and it’s all thanks to Frogwares’ Sherlock Holmes: Chapter One, a prequel-slash-soft reboot of their successful Sherlock Holmes adventure series, and their first game since The Sinking City.
Sherlock Holmes is one of the most beloved characters among mystery fans. For a century and a half he’s been the iconic detective, with his trademark deerstalker hat, fat pipe and magnifying glass being key identifiers for a sort of platonic ideal of a Victorian detective. But for as many adaptations of Arthur Conan Doyle’s work as are out there, there’s been just as many original takes, from modernizations like BBC’s Sherlock (or CBS’ Elementary, for a US variant) to crossovers with other Victorian-era characters (Arsène Lupin being a popular one, going back to an unauthorized crossover by Lupin’s creator himself, but there’s also stories pitting Holmes against Jack the Ripper or even Dracula.)
(Watch this space for a Jack the Ripper extravaganza. I wasn’t content to let From Hell be the end of my time with England’s most famous serial killer.)
Frogwares, a French-Ukrainian outfit currently working in a warzone, have spent the last twenty years building their own Sherlock Holmes canon, starting from The Mystery of the Mummy in 2002. While the series has experienced very soft reboots over the years, Sherlock Holmes: Chapter One represents something a little more substantial; it steps away completely from the iconic, middle-aged version of Sherlock that we’re familiar with to wind back the clock to 1880 and a younger, rawer Sherlock Holmes, with an emotional depth and tragic backstory that isn’t typically seen in Sherlock stories. He’s also been aged down a little bit; traditionally believed to have been born in 1854, in Frogwares’ current canon his birth year is closer to 1859 (though his brother Mycroft remains around the same age.) This places him around 21, and not yet having met Watson (though the opening scene of their first appearance, A Study in Scarlet, is rendered faithfully in the game’s ending.)
Chapter One may initially seem a bit of an oddball to anyone passingly familiar with Sherlock. Set not in London, but rather the fictional Mediterranean island of Cordona, a British colonial holding similar to Gibraltar or Malta, the warm beaches and colorful avenues are a stark contrast to squalid, smog-choked London, making the game feel a little like a sort of Victorian Death in Paradise. Moreover, as this is a prequel set in 1880, John Watson is not here; instead, however, is Sherlock’s imaginary friend, known only as Jon (no H.) Jon serves as a sort of guide and morality pet; he’s there to help Sherlock, or “Sherry” as he frequently calls our hero, stay on track for solving cases, and he also has his own opinions on how cases should be handled. Throughout the game you’ll be building a relationship with him — he’ll prefer certain outcomes over others, he’ll provide challenges (usually something a little silly) and he’ll frown on you fumbling about in the course of your investigating, like asking too many of the wrong people. You’ll usually find that he’s gotten to the crime scene before you; the game makes no bones about the fact that he is, in fact, Sherlock’s imaginary friend, but the way he seems to pop in and out of existence when you’re not looking seems to be a reference to the infamous “Creepy Watson” meme dating back to Sherlock Holmes: Nemesis, which was a result of Frogwares — at the time an indie outfit, with an indie outfit’s finances — not coding in walking animations.
You’ll get used to Jon eventually, especially once it becomes clear that he’s there for a reason. Sherlock, having ignored his brother’s advice, has returned to Cordona, where he spent a couple years as a child following the death of his father, to pay respects to his mother, who died a decade prior to the game. As he wanders around the city, he begins to uncover old memories of his youth — not all of which were pleasant. The more he digs into the circumstances of his mother’s death, the more he uncovers a tragedy that, unbeknownst to him, has come to define who he is. Jon is a fabrication — and, it is implied, a kind of psychological tulpa — created to help him cope with his father’s death; and, likewise, Jon is keen to steer Sherlock away from finding the truth about his mother. In a very real way, Jon represents another side of Sherlock’s personality. Sherlock as we see him in the game is analytical, impatient, prone to showing off his ability to read people, values solving the crime above all other concerns, and frequently fails to understand certain aspects of human behavior; basically he’s a poster child for neurodiversity. While he’s not completely humorless, he’s somewhat singleminded; Jon represents a more whimsical, moral side of him, frequently making jokes and taking advantage of the fact that nobody but Sherlock can see him.
On a purely technical level, Sherlock Holmes: Chapter One isn’t terribly different from The Sinking City; you pretty much do a lot of the same things. A typical case goes as such: you visit the crime scene or start the case some other way, gather evidence, talk to people until you run out of dialogue, then you use the evidence you gathered (some of which, cleverly enough, will not be written down — it’s up to the player to have a keen eye to notice details) to figure out your next steps. The game does offer suggestions on what to do with that evidence, with icons suggesting you ask around (and you’ll have to be precise in who you ask — workers might know something the hoity-toity do not — and how you ask them — those workers might not be willing to talk to someone in fancy clothes!) or visit one of three archives to look up records, among other avenues. One particular element of this that tripped me up a couple of times was that you’ll need to pin specific evidence (helpfully marked with an eye symbol) to make spots that you need to concentrate on appear. I sometimes would wander aimlessly around a scene looking for evidence that I couldn’t see because the appropriate piece of related evidence wasn’t pinned. For the major storyline cases, you’ll be presented with a Mind Palace, with multiple pieces of evidence that need to be matched together to make conclusions. As these conclusions pile up, you’ll sometimes be forced to choose between mutually-exclusive conclusions — did a character unwittingly step in blood by accident when he stumbled upon the crime scene, or did he forget to clean up after committing the murder? Once you have enough of these opposing conclusions and toggle them all to generally agree with each other, they’ll point to one final conclusion or another — character A did it, character B did it, and so on. From there you can decide the nature of that outcome — was it an accident? Was it cold-blooded murder?
Most of the time, it doesn’t really matter which conclusion you come to. Many of the cases, including the main storyline ones, end ambiguously — an element continuing from Sherlock Holmes: Crimes & Punishment. Whoever you point the finger at will often admit to doing it. This can feel unsatisfying — after all, what’s the point of doing all that work if it doesn’t matter who’s the villain? — but over time I began to see the value in it. It’s not just about showing Sherlock as the genius crime-solver he is, it’s about creating a vibe and telling a story. Gamers like to make a big deal about choices mattering — it’s a tag on Steam for a reason — and so something like this obviously would be seen as your choices not mattering. But when you get down to it, if none of your choices matter, then every choice matters — reality itself will alter to fit your conclusions. While Sherlock — through Jon — will sometimes have misgivings about how the case concludes (thus suggesting that there is a “correct” answer, or at least a moral one) you’re generally left to decide on your own what the truth is — in a place where the truth is often hard to come by. Cordona, with its melting pot of cultures and sometimes bloody history, is sometimes dangerous, often morally murky, the sort of place where anyone could be getting up to some villainy. A good example is a late-game case — I think it’s a DLC addition — where an affable minor character, in a position of respectability and authority, disappears. As you track them down it becomes clear that they’ve been engaging in graverobbing to fund their exorbitant lifestyle.
Speaking of danger, many cases involve gunplay; you’ll quickly begin to recognize combat arenas on sight, as they’re all set up in more or less the same fashion: a squareish room, one door on each side, with various pieces of high and low cover scattered about in a somewhat symmetrical fashion. Your job in these situations is to take down typically a dozen armed goons; Jon prefers you didn’t kill anyone, so if you can distract your opponents — say, shoot their hat off, or knock out a steam pipe next to them — you can run up and do a little QTE to take them down non-lethally (if not non-painfully — one of the animations involves Sherlock shooting them in the foot!) This is unfortunately one of the most tedious parts of the game, which is probably why I didn’t bother doing any of the repeatable “bandit lairs” scattered throughout the island save the first one I tried to see what it was like. (They’re a great way to earn money, especially if you select the additional challenges you can unlock, but as long as you’re frugal and do every case, you can buy pretty much all of the furniture and art stuff that gets sent to the old family home.)
Sherlock Holmes: Chapter One is a fairly original take on a beloved character. While there are the occasional technical issues — one of the very last side cases was unable to even be properly started because the game reliably crashed when I visited the crime scene — it’s overall somewhat less of a janky mess than The Sinking City; I also felt that it handled its socio-cultural issues with a lot more panache than its immediate predecessor, though it’s a matter of debate whether Sherlock’s moments of mild sexism are due to the prevailing sexual attitudes of the day, or, given how generally egalitarian Cordonan society seemed to be, at least on a surface level, he’s just a bit of an asshole. (Probably both.) Despite some these issues and the occasionally unsatisfying case, a combat element that’s uninteresting and out of place, and a treasure hunt side quest that was particularly dull, I found the game to be a refreshing adventure with well-written primary characters and an emotional finale that adds a lot of depth to a character who has long been little more than a pastiche. It more than makes up for The Sinking City, and I’m eager to play the remake of Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened soon.
