It’s impossible to review Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened without addressing its circumstances. Caught in the chaos of Russia’s attempted invasion of Ukraine, developer Frogwares decided to crowdfund a project that might be quickly achievable amid regular power cuts, internet outages, and worse disruption: a remake of its 2008 Sherlock Holmes/HP Lovecraft mash-up.
The surprise, then, is that the resulting game doesn’t feel troubled by its fast and difficult development. Far from a rushed retread of the original game, Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened feels fully reimagined with care and polish, and the result is an impressive, modern detective game that will feel fresh for longtime fans, but also requires no nostalgia or knowledge of the original to enjoy.
It helps that it has a killer premise: iconic detective Sherlock Holmes taking on the strangeness of the Lovecraft mythos. The man who never stops digging and always finds a rational explanation meets a world where the more you investigate the more bizarre and horrifying the answers become, until you go mad for lack of any rationality at all. It’s an unstoppable force hitting an immovable object, and
