Sherlock Holmes: Chapter One Announced

I’ve said it time and time again, I like the Sherlock Holmes games. They aren’t the triple-A open worlds guiding you across the map to stab the next useless thing for a collectible, they are something different. They are often filled with the usual puzzle of a dead man skewered by something that someone probably threw, and so on. They try and be clever enough that you don’t feel like everything is a cakewalk or too hard you can’t solve it. Frogwares’ Sherlock games are adventure game logic that makes enough sense because one man is on all the drugs and another just can’t say no.

Announced yesterday in an exclusive with Gamespot, Frogwares’ next game in the Sherlock series isn’t continuing from the downright mad and wonderful The Devil’s Daughter. Instead, the addict and the enabler have become Britain’s next top gay models, as both Sherlock and his man-friend look young, prim, and like they haven’t seen a woman’s stomach turned inside out by a knife. Sherlock Holmes: Chapter One is taking us back to 1875 when Sherlock would have been a young nipper at the age of 21. Following his mother’s death, Sherlock returns home to uncover the mystery, conspiracy, and all the drugs his Mediterranean home town has to offer.

Of course, taking the focus away from cases and focusing more the personal story of the great detective’s origin will be a change. Usually, he’ll find a case that leads to hijinks and a bit of introspection naturally. Now it seems he’s going to face a reverse of that as through personal strife he’ll uncover a plot to become the world’s renowned detective he has yet to become. What concerns me is the idea of Chapter One extending into chapter two, three, four, and twelve. Games and game developers will often use the end of a game as “Join us on our next exciting episode, will the hero fall to his death, will the big breasted woman in a low cut top be flattened by a train, and will the villain get away with it?” As typical, no, no, and no.

Sherlock Holmes: Chapter One is set to release sometime in 2021 on Xbox One, PS4, PC (Steam, GOG, and Epic Games Store), Xbox Series X, and PS5.