I started playing Sherlock Holmes Crimes and Punishments and thought about writing a game analysis, but after a few hours of gameplay I thought it would be more interesting if I used my observations around this game as a thread for a sort of case study on the topic of the detective/investigative game genre.

In the end it turned out to be a useful exercise for organising my thoughts and making it clearer for myself what detective games are and what they could be.

TL;TR, here’s some of the main points I make in this article: 

1. A detective game is a game with systems and dynamics that include collection of clues, drawing of conclusions (optional), and communication of conclusions.
2. It is very difficult to integrate deductive mechanics in video games in a way that feels natural and fun.
3. The wittiest detective in a detective game shouldn’t be Sherlock Holmes, but the player.
4. The best detective games are not about detectives.
5. There’s a lot to be explored and done in the genre from a game design point of view, which is exciting!

I want to start by saying that I love Frogware’s Sherlock Holmes games. I love them for what they are, with all their quirks and their flaws. 

I also deeply admire the project of this studio. That this is pretty much what they do. Sherlock Holmes video games. They’ve been doing it since the year 2000. For more than twenty years, their project has consisted on developing games based on the most famous detective story of all times. It’s not a trivial task. Actually, I would say, designing a detective game is a proper conundrum in itself. A mystery yet to be solved. My brain hurts even just thinking about it. I don’t think I could ever design such engaging and charming adventure games as Frogwares does. 

Do mechanics matter in the murder mystery game market?

Today there’s many murder mystery or detective video games and board games out there. The genre has gained popularity among different market demographics, not just hardcore players. I am not surprised. I mean, the whole premise of a detective game is pretty thrilling in itself. I think it’s human nature feeling compelled to a mystery, and wanting to feel the satisfaction of solving it. Despite the size of the market, I think many of these games don’t aim too high. Whenever I browse the book shop shelves here in Germany, which are packed with exit and mystery board games of all sorts, I feel like there is a normalisation around the level of expectations of the casual market. Many players will just do with a catchy theming and a fantasy more or less appealing and well presented. The mechanics are left to one side, deprioritized. Some times awkwardly or barely implemented with the story. But it doesn’t matter. The market is big enough and offers enough variety of products. The consumers will just get something else next time. Also… let’s consider for a second… does the consumer even care about the mechanics? I mean, we have all been playing Monopoly and Cluedo for decades… 

When thinking about all of this, I decided that a purist game design approach is not too useful. Finishing a product that appeals and sells is a difficult task that shouldn’t be underestimated. You need good copywriting, good packaging and material design. You need good art too. There’s a lot that game designers can learn from paying a visit to the board game store. 

But also, lots of consumers do care about depth and richness of mechanics. I know I do! And I know there’s a bunch of fun little mystery games with really elegant and creative design out there. It’s just somehow difficult to find, and it costs money to try everything until finding it. So if you have any recommendations, feel free to send them my way. 

Anyways. Going back to the focus on mechanics. I guess my goal when writing this article was to figure out what they can add to the experience. In my mind, the power of interaction, of machine to brain input/output exchange is that when designed with purpose, it can do something awesome. Something close to magic. It can immerse you as a player in the fantasy of being an investigator, where you can feel like you are cracking an incredible mystery. Like Sherlock, or Poirot, or Leblanc, or whomever else impressed you with their deductive skills. 

I guess the question I want to answer is… How close or how far are we from delivering that player experience? Will we ever manage? 

And this is where we start the real design talk. 

Game dynamics in detective games

A game that belongs to the investigative or detective genre in its core, will include the next systems dynamics:

1. Collection of clues 
2. Drawing of conclusions (optional)
3. Communication of conclusions (communication with the game, that is)

Different games will inject these in different patterns, mechanics, flows, and flavours. For each idea we fall in love with though, there’s also a lot of difficult design questions that emerge. They are difficult because we are designing a detective/investigative/deduction-based game, a genre that involves interacting with content that is really tricky to sort out. Mystery, obfuscation of information, surprise, misleading, and so on and so forth. 

In the collection of clues dynamic, for instance, we need to confront questions like: 

• In what forms do the clues manifest? Written documents, images, sound, environmental clues, interrogations, or body language? 
• How are the clues integrated in the environment? Obfuscated by noise? Hidden in plain view? Exposed by show me buttons? 
• What is the interaction taking place during the collection of clues? Does the clue just go to the inventory? Do we need to manipulate and reveal its meaning somehow?
• Are there red herrings or clues that are there just to distract the attention? 
• Etc.

The second systems dynamics, drawing of conclusions, consist of us, with our detectivesque brainy brain, inferring meaning that is relevant to the investigation from the clues that we found. 

This process is not always supported by the systems of the game in an explicit way, although it needs to happen in the process of solving the mystery somehow. Sometimes the players keep notes and draw conclusions outside the game, for example. Other games more or less explicitly inspire players to discuss with a helper in order to figure out the meaning of things. It can also be that the communication of conclusions dynamics also involve interactions where the player needs to draw conclusions. 

Some questions to ask oneself when designing these systems: 

• How do the clues translate into information? Can the clues be combined in more advanced levels of information? 
• How are the clues stored after they are found? In a container without hierarchy or classification? Or does the player have tools to bookmark, classify, order, and tag them? 
• How can the clues be examined after they are found? All at once? One at a time? Free style?
• Etc. 

Finally, because this whole thing is about solving a mystery, when we have gone through the collection of clues we need someone to give us feedback and confirm or validate that our conclusions are right (or wrong).

More questions arise here around a number of areas:

• Moment of communication. At what moment can we initiate the communication? What is the condition that allows the player to communicate the conclusions? How is it visualised? 
• Type of input. How do we introduce the conclusion? Filling up gaps with information? Connecting clues with each other? Do we even need to input our conclusions? 
• Accuracy of conclusions. Does the game accept more than one answer? Does the game need all the pieces to be in the right place, or only a part of them? Does the player have different attempts to try to introduce different conclusions? 
• Validation of conclusions. How does the game “tell us” that the conclusion is correct? With a checkbox? A cutscene? Branching consequences in the story? Can we introduce incorrect conclusions?    
• Irrevocability of input. Once we try to validate a conclusion, if it’s wrong or incomplete, can we go back to the scene and continue collecting more information? Does the game help us with some hints? Is it game over and we need to start from scratch? Can we continue playing the game even if we introduced a wrong solution? 

These three system dynamics will feed a level or narrative design at the rhythm the designers choose, depending on the structure of the content and the way the story is integrated. 

We can have a rigid or a linear design, where certain steps need to be completed (like in Sherlock Holmes Crimes and Punishments), or we can have a more flexible design, where you can draw and communicate conclusions without having to have found all the clues. 

Playing a game and figuring how all these are combined and implemented is an investigation in itself, and can be one of the most fun things one can experience as a video game player. It’s a big part of why I love these games. 

The context

You, as a player, find clues and communicate conclusions in a context. 

One thing I’ve noticed, as a murder mystery game player, is that normally in games there’s two ways you can go here. 

You can go realistic, as in, you explicitly take what we know or what the common understanding is about how a police investigation works, and then translate that with little level of abstraction into the context of the game. “Realistic” here doesn’t always mean you are necessarily a detective. I apply the term “realistic” here in the sense of “there is a direct correlation between the way a police investigation manifests in the real world, and the way the components of the game represent the story or fantasy”.

The benefits of this approach is that players can quickly parse meaning and figure out the systems and dynamics in the game work. For example, we all know instinctively what one needs to do when visiting a crime scene after a murder has taken place. Or when we are sitting in front of a suspect in a police office.

Also, there are advantages when marketing games with a realistic context. As I said before, murder mystery is a popular genre these days, and it’s nice to take advantage of the synergies of popularity created by cinema and literature for instance. 

On the other hand, the problem of deciding to go realistic is that we will need to try to workaround the aspects that don’t translate too well from running a police investigation to a video game: 

• The amplitude of the space where the clues need to be searched can be overwhelming. Looking for clues might become tedious and monotonous.
• There is a lack of given focus and direction. You’re pretty much alone in this. If someone told you where the clues are… well, what would you be doing here in the first place?
• The feedback is scarce and not always timely. A detective could be looking for clues and drawing conclusions for long amounts of time without ever getting a single indication as to whether they are going in the right direction or not. In video games players need feedback often to stay engaged. This is a fundamental principle in video game design, present in the most granular manifestation of game interactions. You do something, you get feedback on that something.

When you play realistic investigative games, you can often feel how the game design tries to workaround these with little benefit for the player fantasy. This happens, for instance, when the collection of clues gets reduced to a show me functionality, or a pixel hunt, or when the hint systems are too forgiving. 

Then there are two things that can happen. Option A, the game preserves its investigative mood, theme, story, atmosphere and vibe, but there’s nothing investigative in the player experience and interaction. Or… The game becomes inaccessible and obscure. 

Now, to the second way you can go when it comes to context.  

Instead of making a detective game that is supported in an existing realistic context, you create a context. A context where the mechanics and dynamics can live happily and deliver an immersive and flawless experience that makes the player feel like they are doing some good old investigative work. 

Here’s some examples:

• The Return of Obra Dinn 
• The Case of the Golden Idol 
• Strange Horticulture
• Her Story 

In some of these games, there are police investigation themes or analogies, but none of them reproduces the fantasy of being a cop investigating a crime realistically. Still, when you play these games, you feel like a real detective. 

Games like these have extremely polished and thoughtful clue collection mechanics and refined content, and impressively simple and clever systems for communicating conclusions that flow in self-contained contexts. These game concepts involve focus and design elegance. The game designers chose not to have everything. They didn’t add more and more. They subtracted.  

I think these are the games that bring detective games and game design in general to an interesting and even revolutionary direction. Not realistic games. When I try to picture a virtual reality game where I play a police investigator with complete freedom to act and in a context that depicts what a real police investigation is with extreme level of detail and accuracy, I think that would actually make for a great simulation, but for a horribly tedious video game. 

Collecting clues in Sherlock Holmes Crimes and Punishments

In Sherlock Holmes Crimes and Punishments you need to collect a lot of clues. I like how these clues are integrated in the environment, but for me, as a player, finding those clues ends up becoming a mundane task. This is not a new or an easy design problem. Since the locations need to feel realistic and immersive with the time period, the environmental art includes lots of background elements. This is a double edge sword. As a Sherlock Holmes fan, I really enjoy navigating these locations. I have rarely seen such beautifully designed and immersive locations. I love the details, and I’m amazed by the work of documentation behind it. But once you have these scenes, how do you make the search of clues bearable, so that the player doesn’t need to spend hours inspecting every single object? I don’t like negative feedback as a solution to this problem, and I am happy that the developer didn’t choose to go that way here. I think using UI elements to point at clues helps rendering a casual gameplay and solves the problem of background noise. 

However, there is a downside to this. The human brain is lazy and when it detects a shortcut, it will take it every time it has the opportunity. So finding clues in this game becomes a matter of running around scanning the environments and waiting for the magnifying glass icon to pop up. To mitigate this, there are also “red herrings” in the background, or elements that you can inspect as clues but that don’t have any particular relevance. These are extremely rare though, so I know most of the times when a magnifying glass pops up it means there is a clue I need to click on. 

Integrating clues in a rich environment in a natural and engaging way is a difficult design problem. 

Another part of the collection of clues that felt a bit underwhelming for me was the way the Imagination and Attention mechanics are presented. I like the mechanics, but not its integration in the UI/UX. They are accessible in a very prominent place in the UI. This gives you the impression that you must use them often, which is not true during a big part of the game. 

The nature of the mechanic itself renders a problem. Imagination and Attention are special states, a sort of trance in which Sherlock can see some things that the rest of us can’t. And this produces a paradox. Because I can’t see them, I don’t know when I should hit the button to use the skill. The developer tackled this issue by showing a hint whenever you need to use the skills. But that basically removes the puzzle solving aspect, and turns part of the experience, once more, to finding the pixel you need to aim at.

Communicating conclusions in Sherlock Holmes Crimes and Punishments

This is how the communication of conclusions works in Sherlock Holmes Crimes and Punishments. Some of the clues you collect in the game will produce observations that you need to connect in pairs to produce more involved statements. Some of those statements will contradict each other, and in those cases, the player can choose the one they find more plausible. All the chosen statements will then connect in a sort of network pointing at one out of several possible resolutions for the case. 

What you do here matters a big deal. Depending on your choices (on how you connect the observations), you might or might not solve the case correctly. I really like the idea. I think it’s audacious and requires a lot of design work. There is some awkwardness though. 

For one, all the resolutions seem equally plausible in the end. And it can’t be any other way. If there was one clear path that is obviously right, then what is the point in allowing other options in the first place? The effect of this though is that making a choice can end up feeling like a leap of faith more than an informed decision. This represents a difficult balancing problem that always involves trade offs. 

Now to another aspect.

How does the player know when they can communicate conclusions? This is a big deal in detective game design. The game needs to confirm somehow, at some point, that you have enough information to make an informed hypothesis. This is a problem I have encountered often in mystery board games too. You get to the end, after having collected many many clues, and you feel like there is nothing else to find. But you can’t actually know. I mean, you know if you actually have collected everything. But not if you haven’t. The amount of content isn’t always exposed in games. If you are playing with a deck of cards, then it’s clear when you’ve reached the end. But if we are talking about a digital game, you don’t always have a way to know that you are at the end. Unless the game tells you. The downside of the game telling you is that this doesn’t feel aligned with the fantasy. On the other hand, the downside of the game not telling you is that you might have indeed missed a clue or a whole thread of investigation, and your conclusion might be uninformed and wrong. So much time working on a case for this… 

In Sherlock Holmes Crimes and Punishments you can see in the deduction board when you know enough to communicate a resolution. Which is good. The metaphor of the neurones merging in Sherlock’s brain when he’s caught in a sort of meditative state is fun too. I like the UX there.

There are other cool things this game brings to detective games design, like the fail states. If you point at the wrong culprit when trying to solve a case, you get a red mark in your career, and the consequences this might have in the lives of innocent people will also resonate in your future. Also, you can make ethical judgments when deciding what actions to take after a person has been found to be guilty, which is very cool too. This is the sort of thing that really makes you think, really makes you feel the weight of relevant choices over your shoulders. 

Something I observed though is that sometimes the story implementation was not to the level of the systems. There are points where the story had to be brought in a certain direction, but it doesn’t get there in a natural way. Story end mechanics don’t synergise, but kind of move forward stumbling upon each other. 

Examples: 

In The Kew Gardens Drama case, at some point Sherlock decides that he has enough information to arrest someone. This never happened before in the game. You are always the one that decides if you have enough information to arrest a suspect. I can see, as a designer, that agency is taken off the hands of the player here to make the story progress in certain direction, but to me, as a player, this feels jarring.  

In The Abbey Grange Affair, we look at a clue, a photo that shows some of the characters on a trip to Egypt. Then Sherlock mentions a new suspect, a mysterious sailor. The sailor wasn’t shown in the photo or mentioned by the characters or any other clue. There is no way I could have made that connection. From that point on in the story, I could start making deductions that included the figure of the sailor as a suspect. The game just needed to introduce the character, so it just did.

Which brings me to the topic of…

Ludonarrative dissonance

Basically, in Sherlock Holmes Crimes and Punishments, you play as Sherlock Holmes. You control him when investigating the scenes and solving the puzzles. Quite often during my playthrough though it turned out to be that Sherlock knew pieces of knowledge that I didn’t know and didn’t have a way to know. Reversely, I found myself predicting plot points in the story or just realising the meaning of clues when Sherlock was oblivious. 

Here are some examples I experienced while playing the game: 

• The interrogating mechanic consists of selecting questions from a list. Quite often the fact that those questions could be formulated involved in itself the knowledge of information that I didn’t have. It seems like Sherlock had somehow collected that information behind the curtains. 
• Other times I was wittier than Sherlock and already knew what the conclusion was going to be, but I still needed to go through the crit path, and see how Sherlock kept getting surprised by discoveries that at that point were too obvious for me.  

When this sort of disconnection takes place, I don’t feel like I am Sherlock anymore. And we are not a team working together either. The fact that I am controlling him makes it feel a little bit weirder. I feel like a will that is possessing his soul, but not his brain. 

A word on help systems

Help systems in detective games is a topic where I could be babbling for pages and pages. I find it as fascinating as any other design problem that doesn’t have a single correct solution and where the ways to tackle it can vary so hugely. 

In Sherlock Holmes Crimes and Punishments I was close to rage quitting a couple times. There’s a lot of “show me” features that are really nice integrated in the UI, like the task list. Also, next to each clue you can see what action you need to perform to make progress. The problem for me was the pixel hunt. The crit path is really linear, and you need to click on all the clues and trigger all the necessary conversations if you want to make progress in the story. I got stuck many times because I hadn’t hunted one specific pixel, even though I knew enough and I was ready to continue with the next steps in the investigation. 

Which brings us to the topic of… 

Watson

Here’s a list of things Watson is not in this game:

• It’s not you, the player. After seeing the disconnection between Sherlock’s and my own progress in the investigation, I feel like maybe it could have been more natural if I, the player, was Watson. Sherlock then could be guiding the investigation, and I could be a decent helper. 
• But above everything, there is one thing Watson is not. He’s not a help system. But why oh why. I turned back to him numerous times during my playthrough, just led by an instinct, and 90% of the time he was just repeating the same two or three barks, that were completely irrelevant to the case. The other 10% of the time his comments were more or less relevant. 

So mostly, the only purpose of Watson in this game is to bring flavour to the cutscenes, and for making me feel chased the whole time. 

Creepy Watson (from the game Sherlock Holmes Nemesis) [Vid]
by u/martinbishop in gaming

Last words

As I said at the beginning of the article, I love this Sherlock Holmes game. The systems that make it difficult to design an elegant narrative are also the systems that converge into really charming and fun gameplay moments.

There were times when the mechanics came together quite nicely, creating memorable moments, like in the case of A Half Moon Walk. I think in this case, the level of the mechanics design is at the same level of the narrative design. I felt like I was doing serious investigative work, and at moments I felt as witty as I imagine Sherlock might have felt.  

Other things I liked: 

• The mini games
• That you can disguise yourself 
• Some other small surprises here and there, like when you impersonate other characters

To summarise it, let’s say there was frustration as well as enjoyment while playing this game, which let me learn a lot about detective games in particular, and game design in general. 

I think observing detective/mystery games from a systems point of view is the way to move the genre forward, and weirdly enough, game designs that practise abstraction and seem to be about everything except for detective games are the future of the genre. 

I will be looking forward to feeling the thrill of solving a mystery by identifying plants in an herbarium or figuring out what the weather is going to be.