Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective 1 - The Case of the Mummy's Curse

The Good
The concept is very intriguing: you solve a murder case as Sherlock Holmes. Instead of usual adventure game mechanics, you only choose the next destination from a list, watch FMV interrogations and have to puzzle the clues together yourself. In the end, you enter the court and have to name the murderer and the motive. I was always interested in this game (the original version was released in 1991) and was delighted to finally give it a try.

The Bad
Unfortunately the execution is pretty bad. First off, the acting is amateurish even for the standards of early CD-ROM games. I liked the chap who plays Sherlock Holmes, but everyone else was either stiff or hopelessly overacted. The costumes are hilarious. Normally I would write this off as special charm, but the case is boring, obvious and badly written. What jarred me the most is how the second murder was handled: Holmes enters the residence of a suspect and finds him murdered. Then he invents a murder suspect out of thin air with a ridiculous reasoning and we never hear of it again.

The game design also doesn't work. The game used a point system to rank the player's performance: every action adds penalty points and if you investigated too much, the judge calls you an idiot even when the case is correctly solved. This is a stupid system because it punishes playing the game. It also does not add replayability because everything is fixed - in your second playthrough (mine took three minutes) you are guaranteed to ace it. The hint system is a nice idea, but because the game does not track what videos you have already seen, you will get hints (and penalty points) for things you have already figured out. Also some hints are wrong or needlessly confusing.

The Bottom Line
Maybe some of my complaints come off as unfair because this was one of the first CD-ROM games ever. However, I think my points (with the exception of bad acting which probably would have been offset by the technical amazement) would be justified even in 1991.

In the end, this is a remaster no one needs: the historically interested should play the original instead and for everyone else it has too many flaws to enjoy. I backed the failed Kickstarter campaign and also own the other two remastered cases, but I see no reason to touch them.