FROGWARES & THE CASE OF THE SILVER EARRING
When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle published his first story involving the eccentric detective, Sherlock Holmes, as part of Beeton’s Christmas Annual magazine, I doubt he could imagine the character would one day become part of the cultural zeitgeist. Even if you’ve never read any of the stories he’s in, it’s impossible not to know of the character. Numerous modern detective stories use the same archetype: the extremely clever & insightful, yet neurotic & quirky detective. Even shows not bearing his name have his fingerprints & DNA. Monk, The Mentalist, House… the list goes on. There’s just something that draws us to this type of character. Genius & madness are two sides of the same coin, after all.
As part of the public domain now, anyone can create & sell works either based on the character, or even just using the character directly. This is something I only became aware of recently, when I was perusing the library for a good book & stumbled across “The Beekeeper’s Apprentice”, which for all intents & purposes is publicized fanfiction of the detective with a new teenage sidekick. (This isn’t meant to be a diss toward the book, but more a reflection of my surprise at its existence).
Yet for as much as the character saturates our collective unconscious, there is only one place to turn if one would like to step into the role of Sherlock Holmes in video game form: Frogwares.
Frogwares is a Ukrainian-based game developer. One look at their catalog quickly reveals they have a fondness for detective stories & mysteries. Most of the games they’ve developed are part of their Sherlock Holmes series, & even their original IP, The Sinking City, is a detective story– only this time inspired by writings of H.P. Lovecraft.
As a fan of mystery stories, I only recently read through the entire official canon of Sherlock. My friends often joked about the book, a complete-works volume, looking like the Bible for how big it was. This isn’t the case, of course… it’s much bigger. I have to say, I have mixed feelings about the stories as a whole.
But it was enough to make me seek out Frogwares’ interpretations of the character. I enjoy a good point-&-click adventure game, & I’m always curious to see how different mediums take on an established formula. I was also curious to see how the company developed their craft over the years. Luckily, it just so happened that Steam has a sale on The Sherlock Holmes Collection from the studio that included most of their older games in the franchise.
What better place to start than the beginning?
Okay, that’s not entirely accurate. The first game in the franchise is The Mystery of the Mummy, but for some reason it wasn’t included in the package. At first I thought the game simply wasn’t available on Steam, but Frogwares’ store page shows it’s free-to-play. But I didn’t learn this until after I started, so oh well.
Sherlock Holmes: The Case of the Silver Earring was published in 2004. To cast our minds back to such a time ago, keep in mind that this was the same year Half-Life 2, Halo 2, & Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines all came out. Granted, it’s probably unfair to compare Frogwares’ games at the time to those massive titles, given that the studio likely only had a dozen or so employees at the time. But this was also the same year Siberia 2 came out, a fellow point-&-click adventure game, so perhaps that’s a more appropriate anchoring point. The game is what you’d expect: you run your cursor over static backgrounds to find interactable items for the protagonist to investigate. I’ve heard adventure games deconstructed to basically being games with liberal interpretations of “keys” to unlock liberal interpretations of “doors,” & that’s probably apt. You have to find certain “key” items or conversation topics to unlock progress, be it to start the next puzzle, progress conversation with a key character, or sometimes literally to open a “door” to the next screen. Many adventure games suffer from having very obtuse “keys”. LucasArts seems to be the worst offender to come to mind, with solutions being hidden behind a string of equally obtuse actions, leaving the player stumbling around, pixel hunting for the next interactable spot in the environment or trying every item in their inventory even if it doesn’t make sense.
I will say that, luckily, for the most part, nothing was that obtuse in The Case of the Silver Earring. Inventory puzzles were typically straightforward, even if you don’t always know what you’re going to do with the item when you first pick it up. For example, I need to make a mask to proceed into a gas-filled room, so I use the knife in my inventory on an obvious bit of cloth I saw in the previous room. Elementary. I also enjoyed playing a bit of forensic scientist between acts by examining clues found at the scenes in Sherlock’s little laboratory.
There were two moments, however, that I found exceedingly grating. They were both what you might call “movement puzzles”. The first, most egregious one, was a stealth mission. Now, I love stealth games; they’re my favorite genre… when done right. When not done right, they’re the worst. Usually, this is when they’re added randomly into non-stealth games. And a point-&-click adventure game is about as non-stealth as you can get. The moment involved trying to navigate a field without being spotted by two patrolling guards. This wouldn’t be so difficult… were we not in a point-&-click adventure game where the only movement options are “walk to where I click” or “jog to where I double-click”. I had to watch a video guide for that section because it’s an instant restart if you’re spotted. And it’s not like there’s a HUD showing the guards’ cone of vision. I found it incredibly frustrating, almost the point of quitting the game.
The second “movement puzzle” involved having to “run” down a maze of paths to find water to put out a fire before the timer ran out (& it destroyed the evidence to continue). Once again, not really the sort of game that lends itself to such a scenario.
At the end of the day, though, I had to ask myself if The Silver Earring was a good representation of Doyle’s stories in video game form. And I feel it was. The Silver Earring felt, to me, like reading a classic Sherlock Holmes story… warts & all. I’m just gonna say it: I don’t think the Sherlock stories are good mysteries. That’s not to say I don’t like them or they’re not enjoyable, because they are. They are good stories; just not good mystery stories. Because when I think of a good mystery, it’s one that you can follow along with, piecing together the clues & making guesses about who the culprit is, until the ultimate reveal. But you can’t really do that in the Sherlock stories.
I think this is due to the fact that none of the books are told from Sherlock’s perspective. This might surprise people who’ve never read the stories themselves, but all the books are written from the perspective of Dr. Watson, chronicling their cases together. So we don’t get to see Sherlock’s thought processes, & neither is he keen on revealing all his deductions until he’s already caught the culprit. After which, the stories take a turn toward the third-person, recounting the culprit’s history and impending motivation leading up to the crime. All the tales follow this pattern. A crime is committed, Watson bumbles along (sometimes with or without Sherlock), Sherlock only tells half of what he’s thinking, they catch the bad guy, the bad guy monologues about his motivation, & then Sherlock finishes spelling out how he knew who the bad guy was. I don’t think Watson ever once solved a case fully on his own.
That isn’t to say you can’t figure out the culprit. I always pinned the guilty party, & perhaps their motive, but it wasn’t from the evidence. I suppose you could say I used inductive reasoning whereas Sherlock uses deductive reasoning. I could never point to one fact & say, “This is why I think that.”
All that was to say that I walked away from The Silver Earring with much the same feelings as finishing a Sherlock story. I pinned the culprit (or perhaps one of them) from the very beginning, but it took a very roundabout way of explaining how & why they did it. It’s a convoluted story, really, with multiple culprits randomly deciding to work together in ways that sporadically reveal themselves as you progress. Even in the end, when Sherlock reveals everything (just like the books), I was left scratching my head at the convoluted set of circumstances that lead to orchestrating the crime. Heck, even the eponymous silver earring is barely a factor, appearing in the beginning & only linking the two previously unconnected suspects together at the very end. The game does its best to help you along, with quizzes between acts (presumably Sherlock asking Watson about the evidence) to help you keep up to pace, but it just ends up feeling like two stories mashed together.
I can’t be too hard on Frogwares for an eighteen-year-old game, & one of their earliest. Anyone who enjoys point-&-click adventure games learns to love the jank that comes with it. I would frequently find myself laughing at a character clipping through a scene, or seeming to float over the still background, or the voice acting. It’s charming jank, at least. Some of the more egregious puzzles almost made me quit, but I was at least invested enough in the story to want to see it through. And there is something to be said for a developer nailing another medium almost too well. It feels very cozy. Like reading a flawed but earnest story while curled up on the couch.
Clocking in at around 7 hours, give or take how long you get stuck on the puzzles, its base price of $9.99 on Steam is a bit much, but it always seems bundled with five other Sherlock games at $39.99, making them all roughly $6 apiece. I think I got it on sale for even less than that price. So if you’re a fan of old adventure games or just can’t get enough Sherlock Holmes, the bundle’s worth picking up. If you’re not a fan of old-school, slow, ploddy adventure games, this won’t be the one to change your mind.
With luck & health, may we return again for our next caper together to observe the case of Frogwares & the evolution of Sherlock Holmes.
Title: Sherlock Holmes: The Case of The Silver Earring
Console: PC, Wii
Rating: T
Developer: Frogwares
Publisher: Ubisoft
Release Date: August 27, 2004
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