After watching this tour of Sherlock Holmes Chapter One, I have deduced the plot already. It’s elementary, really. As a young Sherlock, you’ll be wandering around an open-world full of crimes and clues, dressing up to interrogate and investigate. It makes the reveal painfully obvious to me: the end-game will be to unmask Hitman’s Agent 47 as the killer!
I’m being cheeky, but it does pay a passing resemblance to the Hitman series at first glance. As he wanders around Cordona, an island paradise with plenty of crimes just lying around, the form of Hitman can be felt in the island’s wandering AI and Sherlock’s casual strolling among them. But Sherlock’s there to reverse engineer all the clever criminality, so the function is very different.
The disguises are serious business. You’ll need to build a whole new profile to convince people you are who you say you are. A beard won’t work if you’re pretending to be an old lady, and being dressed as a pirate while trying to blend in as a proper sailor will almost certainly get you chinned. Cordona has a social structure that you have to adhere to as well. Poshos won’t like it if you’re dressed like a poor person while demanding to know where they were at 2.30am.
In addition to that, there’s ‘concentration mode’ which lets you know a few details about the people around you to help tailor your interrogations. It probably helps to know that the Ethiopian potter is a hostile cross-dresser.
I want to know more about how you solve things, though. I like the idea of you using your intuition to mix and match clues, pinning information from the casebook to help guide your investigation based on what you’ve selected, but the video doesn’t really show how the player brings it all together. That’s really going to be the crux of the game. I want to see it.
There’s no release date for this, but Alice B. had a wee chat with the developers nearly a year ago. Go read it.