“Sherlock Holmes: The Devil’s Daughter” is the eighth installment of developer Frogwares’ adventure game series. Being unfamiliar with the series, I grabbed my magnifying glass, smoking pipe and best deerstalker hat to investigate this game.
At its core, “The Devil’s Daughter” is a point-and-click mystery game revolving around surveying crime scenes for clues. Along the way, players interrogate people for information, eavesdrop on conversations and use Sherlock’s almost supernatural powers of deduction.
The game brings some fun elements to the detective-mystery genre. For example, during a conversation, you can slow down time to identify characteristics of your subject, revealing hidden clues. Once all the required clues are found and conversations completed, you then literally connect the clues in Sherlock’s mind to choose who you think is guilty.
Unfortunately, there are restrictions from advancing the scenes, which take away from this experience. You must have clicked on the required number of events or objects before you can move on to where the clues are pointing you, even if it is painfully obvious without the remaining clues.
This leads to situations like one where I had to eavesdrop on conversations to identify someone in the room. After the first conversation I overheard, I could identify said man, but I had to listen to three more conversations before I could proceed.
Between looking for clues, you play mini-games like stalking a suspect through the streets of Victorian London. However, the mostly boring mini-games and their specific mechanics rarely show up again, and each one feels like it last twice as long as it should.
For a lower-budget game, the graphics are impressive. Each scene is greatly detailed, especially Sherlock’s apartment, which has something worth looking at in every corner. The character models look great, and I refuse to believe Sherlock Holmes was not modeled after actor Jon Hamm.
The story consists of five separate cases, each lasting around two hours, but the lackluster story barely makes slogging through the gameplay worth it.
Making matters worse are performance issues plaguing The Devil’s Daughter. Frame rates periodically drop and screen tearing is a major problem. Loading times, which you encounter frequently, are painfully long, making the game feel like one from a couple generations ago.
In fact, the very first loading screen of the game, before the first cutscene ever played, hard crashed my console.
At the end of the day, “The Devil’s Daughter” is not fun enough to justify playing through the performance issues, nor is the story worth hanging around for. Unless you are dying for a Sherlock Holmes video game, you are better off passing on this game.

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Courtesy of Frogwares Game Development Studio

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