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Originally Posted by katie
Why was that, Ragnar? Be interested to know why as you seem to be in a minority (not that we can expect everyone to like every game). But many people really enjoyed it, I must admit I did get very confused with the explanation at the end of who did what, and chewed my brains out with the dog in the yard, but it was a good game on the whole.
Katie.
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I was disappointed because I had expected more. It's a decent game, but not much more.
And you're quite right to ask me for an explanation for my views, since the views themselves are not very interesting.
The first disappointment was with the atmosphere of the game. While
Silver Earring has rather nice graphics, all the characters seems so stiff and the entire game world lacks the dynamics one would have expected. And Sherlock seems to be just a show-off that explains to death needless deductions of unimportant people. Certainly there are those elements in the book, but it were pulled off much better there and made in a more humorous tone.
The second was the fact of the quiz. I want to enjoy myself, not answer test on the story. It's like you are back to the school bench where you study to make tests instead of study for fun and future profit (as in more knowledge). Here you play to make some stupid tests. What's more, the tests didn't seem to have that much to do with the actual story. And it makes me think that Frogwares themselves doesn't think that they are good at telling a story. Why would they need a test to make sure people follow the story if they were able to get the story through without it?
The third disappointment is about the dialogue, which like the overall game is stiff and lacks refinement. The humour from the books are nearly completely gone. The actors I think, while speaking proper English, were bored out of their skulls when they recorded the voices for the game. Many clichés are overused such as "simplicity itself", "elementary" etc.
The fourth is that there is virtually nil interaction between Holmes and Watson. In the books, Watson's rôle is to be like the dumb reader, who knows very little how to solve the case and ask the stupid questions to Holmes about solutions that the reader surely must have thought of. In the game, Watson doesn't seem to have any purpose at all more than taking down notes of the case and doing trivial lookups.
The fifth is the puzzles. The quality is much uneven. There are some good puzzles, but there are also lot of repetition of puzzles and lot of pixel-hunting (find the slightly darker spot on a dark floor and such things).
The original script I think has a promise for a good game, also the graphics and research departments did overall a good job, but overall I don't think it surpasses the decent game rating.
