Have You Played... Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened (2007)?
Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn, my dear Watson...
Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened got a remake back in April, the first game in Frogwares' long-running series to receive a second pass. And you'd better believe that it was like Eldritch Christmas for me, because the 2007 original is quite possibly one of my favourite PC games of all time.
I have a lot of love for Frogwares' Adventures of Sherlock Holmes series in general, but The Awakened is particularly special to me. Most obviously, it's a Sherlock Holmes/Cthulhu Mythos mash-up, which I consider to be the highest form of art in any medium.
It's also part of what I consider to be the most glorious era in Frogwares' history. I love the loosely-formed trilogy made up of this game, Sherlock Holmes vs Arsène Lupin, and Sherlock Holmes vs Jack the Ripper — not just because all three games pit Holmes against an interesting variety of nemeses, but because they came at the peak of Frogwares' decision to play to their strengths and embrace the jank that they couldn't iron out. This teaser (which is actually for one of the later games in the series, but revisits an infamous glitch from The Awakened) demonstrates what I'm talking about:
The remake looks and feels great, but if there's one thing it loses a bit, it's that joyful sense of everyone being in on the joke when something inevitably goes wrong. I have fond memories of replaying all of these '00s-era Holmes games at a particularly difficult time a few years ago, and — miraculously — laughing until my stomach hurt. It's that memory that led me to chip in on Frogwares' latest venture on Kickstarter, as much as the fact that they really deserve it right now as a Ukrainian team still largely working out of Kyiv.