The title of this game almost put me off it. "Sherlock Holmes VS Jack The Ripper" sounds too much like a "I wonder what would happen if you get these two famous names..." type simple fanfic. It was going cheap in the January sales though, and I felt like playing a detective game as a warm-up before Heavy Rain comes out. ^_^
I played the Xbox 360 version of this from start to end, gaining all 1000 achievement points in the process. It was quite a short game, and not that difficult.
It's a pure puzzle adventure game in which Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle's famous fictional sleuthing duo of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson investigate the real-life case of Jack The Ripper, which was contemporary to when the stories were set.
The game is played with you playing as Holmes or Watson (whichever is appropriate to the scene), in either 3rd person fixed-camera perspective or 1st person view - switchable at the press of a button. I played in 3rd person all the way through. Most of the gameplay is walking around examining and picking up objects and talking to people, with many minigame puzzles to solve. I liked it, but if you are the type of gamer who feels like a game requires action scenes in order to be enjoyable, you probably ought to give this game a miss.
The authenticity of this game is excellent. It seems like a great deal of research went into this game. Graphically, the streets of late 19th century London have been faithfully recreated (well, from what I imagine from historical pictures and from living around English buildings of around the right age). The street furniture, the smog and filth, the prostitution, the gin-soaked population, the clothing, the prevalance of illness and medical practices of the time, and quietly negative attitudes between different people towards each other, all seem to fit well. There is a lot of detail, and it really gave the game the right atmopshere for investigating this mystery. To me, even though I had seen a documentary on Jack The Ripper in the past, it never conjured up the world and setting and hopelessness of the surroundings that this game got across.
Many of the actors seem to speak in London accents which don't seem to quite fit, or have an accent which sounds too modern, but I suppose that is hard to mask. I expect that barely anyone would notice apart from me anyway. It's really my one gripe.
I don't remember much of any Sherlock Holmes stories to know whether the representation of those characters was accurate, but there are small references to make me think that this Holmes is based on the one in the books rather than based on an actor's portrayal of the character. He speaks very quickly and is quite eccentric, loves searching for facts, hates journalists making up stories - all appears consistent with what I know about the character.
I also appreciated the ease of use of the game; it has nice little touches, like when you are examining all objects in a room, and could select from many things to look at in a small area, the game will automatically select the next thing you haven't already examined. You're not often hearing repeated dialogue as a result, and that's just nice. Holmes and Watson often announced where they needed to go next; on one hand this was useful and saved frustration, on the other hand, maybe it felt like it was holding my hand too much - in a game as linear as this, perhaps I should be working that out?
Most of the investigation, examination and deduction parts of the game are similarly structured (as is Holmes' methodology), but the little logic puzzles are all different, so there's a lot of welcome variety in the game.
The game is rated suitable for ages 16+, and you don't see a lot of graphic horror (thank goodness!), and a lot of what you need to investigate closely is done with cartoony drawings rather than the game's more realistic looking engine, but you do have to stomach reading reports on Jack The Ripper's deeds and other sordid goings on in the area.
There is certainly a blur between fact and fiction in this game. The murders did certainly take place in the ways they describe. If you have watched a documentary on Jack The Ripper you might have a good idea how this is all going to turn out, but... the involvement of Holmes and Watson, the exact dialogue from the suspects, some of the incidental characters, must all be fictional. I did also wonder at the end whether the authors of the story in this game told this tale in this way in order to express what attitudes were like and a small amount of a political view, but do it in such a way that it appears to be fact.
For me, just knowing that the terrible acts I was reading about were really carried out on women, that these things really did take place, made it a lot harder to get through. I'm hearing place names and looking at a map and thinking "I've been near there". It brought it all home. Some parts of this game really made me cringe and feel ill in a way that much 18 rated horror has not.
Without giving too much away, my final verdict is that this was a really good game but... not only is there absolutely no replayability in this (which I expected), and by the end, the exploits of Jack The Ripper had become so gruesome and vile that I was wishing the game to wrap up as soon as possible.
I think that it may have been the intention of the makers of this game to make me feel that way, because the feeling of characters in-game matched mine. So maybe that's actually their success. The effect it had on me was quite powerful. The conclusion of the story seems entirely plausable from the facts presented, though I don't know whether anything was left out to make it seem more definite or anything like that.
After this post, I don't really want to think about this ever again.
