➤ Elementary watson. 🎮

Version tested: PC

Probably in Victorian times there were not a few people who made jokes like: "If Holmes were there, the case would be solved immediately", referring to the brutal murders never solved perpetrated by Jack the Ripper against several prostitutes.

In fact, the identity of the murderer still remains a mystery today and the hypotheses made in the course of more than a century of investigations carried out at various levels have led to various results, of which very few satisfactory. Anno domini 2009 DC, the epic brain clash between the most famous investigator and serial killer in the world is staged on our monitors in an advanced and highly curated graphic adventure, completely translated into Spanish and sold at a competitive price .
The story begins with a bored Holmes from the lack of stimulating cases talking to his trusted friend and assistant, Dr. Watson. Reading the newspaper, they learn of the investigation into Jack the Ripper and Holmes decides to go after the killer. The first thing to do is to familiarize yourself with the simple game interface and with the possibility of playing in third person, like in a classic Scumm adventure, or in first person. Then, having collected and opened the map of London, we will leave for the neighborhood where the first crime took place to talk to the local police. The streets are teeming with the poor and criminals. There are prostitutes and drunks in every corner and everything smells of mold and decay. The three-dimensional models are good and the environment smells of lived-in. Fortunately, the Spanish dub does justice to the English one and doesn't spoil the atmosphere.

Comparison

The Xbox 360 version is the same as the PC version, with the usual small graphic differences given by the different achievable resolution and the full price on console, against the 19.90 euros of the PC version.

Induction and deduction

We will therefore need to retrieve a briefcase containing the police report on the first murder. It is an easy task but it must not be deceiving, because things will not take long to get complicated. As we will soon verify, the documents available during the game are not trappings, but they fit perfectly into the gameplay. Reading them, Holmes and Watson (with the collaboration of the player) will have to draw deductions to continue the case. In addition to the documents, the dynamic duo will also have to examine crime scenes for clues.

When they have collected enough, a sequence of reconstruction of the crime will start with the player busy putting together the different elements to draw conclusions. The fundamental phases are: the reconstruction of the dynamics of the crime carried out by having the protagonists act; examination of the corpse; the measurement of the traces and the deduction of new facts through the concatenation of the elements collected in the previous phases. Unfortunately, the game is not without flaws and it is difficult not to notice how the logical puzzles scattered throughout the game break up the narrative tension in an all-too-marked way, especially when you are forced to face them in key moments. Furthermore, the level of challenge is not very high and the complex system of deduction of evidence has been made a little too friendly to make life easier for novices. For the rest, it is an excellent product.

Comment

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7.6

Your vote

Sherlock Holmes vs. Jack the Ripper is a beautiful graphic adventure full of interesting elements presented through a game interface that aims to reconstruct the dynamics of the investigations by exploring them in depth. Despite being helped a lot in carrying out the tasks and despite some errors at the narrative level, we would like to recommend it warmly to fans of the genre, also by virtue of the reduced price at which it is sold in our country.