Have You Played... Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened?

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.

I was recently most entertained by reviews of the utterly bloody awful Sherlock Holmes: The Devil's Daughter, a game actually slightly better than the previously abysmal Crimes & Punishments, as people who'd madly claimed to rate the earlier game suddenly realised what a pile of shite it had all been. But impressively, both represent a huge step forward for the amazingly dreadful series which has been being terrible for over a decade. The Awakened appeared ten years ago.

These games were so otherworldly in their delivery that they literally came with comprehension tests. Like the way anything that could remotely feel close to fun in school had to then be tied to a dreary "learning experience", every chapter here finished with Holmes' demanding Watson correctly remember a bunch of inconsequential stuff that had happened. Gee, that's fun!

The whole game was a mess of pixel hunting in 3D and narrative-free puzzles, all set in a complete town to laboriously drag yourself around, all the time accompanied by the utter terror of Teleporting Watson. It was rubbish. I mention this purely to mock people who liked Crimes & Punishments in the opening line of this article.