The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes
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The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes is an adventure game series made by the American computer game company Electronic Arts in the 1990s. The series contains The Case of the Serrated Scalpel (1992), and the The Case of the Rose Tattoo (1996).
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[edit] Gameplay
The two games in the series were among the first to make extensive use of a location map, which allowed players quick, direct access to all game locations. While not the first computer detective game, The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes nonetheless advanced the genre through its use of the Sherlock Holmes investigative methods, from interviewing witnesses to lab analysis. The games, and in particular the sequel, introduced detailed environments and ambience sounds. The series features a relatively high degree of historic accuracy as it conjures up London of the late Victorian Era.
The crime novel genre of which Sherlock Holmes is part stresses the importance of how details in the surroundings, analysed by the protagonist, may play a decisive part in solving the mystery. In this regard, the gameplay can be said to marry the point-and-click style of 1990s adventure games with the style of Sherlock Holmes novels. Virtually every couch and fireplace in the game has a detailed description when clicked upon. The game is often laid out so that Holmes, when entering a house, will be studying the foyer and its items in detail, deducing much about the inhabitants before being presented to them. The descriptions of everyday items also often encompass a description of Victorian Britain.
[edit] The Case of the Serrated Scalpel
The Player, as Sherlock Holmes, is engaged by Scotland Yard to help with the murder investigation of a young actress. While the manner of her death suggests this is another strike by Jack the Ripper, Holmes believes someone else had committed the crime. The investigation takes Holmes and Watson to many parts of late 19th Century London, including a perfume shop, the zoological gardens, the morgue, a pub, several dwellings, an abandoned dock and of course 221B Baker Street.
The graphics are VGA, with MIDI music and a few scenes with digitalized speech (in the other scenes there are sound effects, but no speech). The player interacts with the characters through a command menu that is intuitive for anyone who had played other adventure games of the period. A manual exists but is not necessary.
[edit] Criticisms
The first game was sometimes blamed for the repetitiveness of its puzzles: in most cases, the player had to figure out a way to open a locked door, and to get rid of a NPC that prevents Holmes from opening this door. These issues seemed to have been corrected in the second game, where puzzles are more diverse.
[edit] The Case of the Rose Tattoo
The Player, first as Doctor Watson and then as Sherlock Holmes, investigates the strange death of an unidentified man in late 19th Century London. In this game, establishing the identity of the victim is as important as finding out who had killed him. The intricate plot leads the player to a great numbers of locations over town and involves several subplots.
The game is longer than its predecessor and features a much higher degree of Historic accuracy and detail. The graphics are near-photo quality and the atmospheric sounds more realistic, while the background music, which communicated the mood of the scenes in the first game, is applied less in the Rose Tattoo. Unlike the previous game, digitalized speech is employed throughout the game and adds characterization to the NPCs.
Most characters in the game appear to have been made by filming real people dressed up in costumes, against a bluescreen. While the characters are more life-like, the Rose Tattoo has done away with the large high-quality faces shown during dialogues in the first game, so that the maximum "resolution" can in a way be said to have decreased from the first to the second game. This use of in-game video can also be found in e.g. Jones in the Fast Lane and Under a Killing Moon and in retrospect appear as a transient trend created by the available hardware. The CD-ROM greatly increased the size a computer game was expected to have. Most games of this period filled the empty space with digitalized speech and cut-scene videos. Later, advances in CPU and graphic card hardware allowed high-resolution characters to be rendered in 3D, obsoleting the photorealistic approach taken in the Rose Tattoo, due to the difficulty of capturing a real-world object in 3D.
