Deduction & Dress-Up: 23 Minutes Of Sherlock Gameplay

The Duke of Deduction and the Duchess of Disguise, they called Sherlock Holmes. Probably. Why not? Sure, whatever. A new Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments trailer demonstrates these skills, and though I might chortle at giving Holmes wild hair and a big old beard from his dress-up box of disguises, the deduction interests me. See, you'll need to search, research, and scrutinise to collect clues, then connect these inside his noggin with mental string to draw conclusions.

And if that doesn't have you curious, the 23-minute gameplay trailer opens with Watson dashing from cover to cover to duck flying bullets and I am exaggerating only through omission.

The trailer cuts up bits and pieces from one of the six cases Holmes tackles in Crimes and Punishments, jumping around all over from investigation to interviews to avoid giving spoilers--though as players draw conclusions themselves, the case could play out differently anyway.

Slightly concerning is that once Holmes has decided someone's guilty, he can decide whether he'll let them go or hand them over to the peelers. Given his firearms practice, how far is he from pulling a leather jumpsuit out his dress-up box and declaring himself Judge Holmes?

I've skipped the series so far, thanks in part to the unfairly off-putting wonkiness of Creepy Watson, but that was long ago and the open-endedness has me curious. I might have a gander when it arrives at the end of September. Here, look: