Sherlock Holmes and the Mystery of Osborne House (Nintendo DS) Review

Rather than being thrown into an adventure filled with intrigue and mystery, this particular game starts off with Sherlock Holmes himself talking about how bored he is by the incoming requests for his services, shooting down any potential conundrums posed in letters Dr. Watson reads to him with the simplest of logic. However, one piece of correspondence does indeed catch his attention, in the form of an invitation to Lord Brainstorming’s abode. After a short while, though, the player is then invited to trudge through a large batch of run-of-the-mill text, moving from location to location (throughout London and the Isle of Wight), talking to various people from 19th Century England in a rather stilted manner (the likes of Professor Moriarty and Queen Victoria, sans personality, for example), and tapping randomly on everything around in the hope of finding items to collect and use later, or one of the few puzzles included.

Whilst other games of its ilk are helped along with a truly gripping tale of intrigue, Mystery of Osborne House sadly does not do the great Sherlock Holmes justice in the slightest, with gamers likely to end up skipping most of the slow moving on-screen text (no voice acting, disappointingly...) and attempting to work through the forty or so puzzles as quickly as they can. If the game lasts more than about three hours you will clearly have been making extremely slow progress. The puzzles themselves can be obscure at times, with hardly any, sometimes even no, explanation as to how they should be tackled, meaning not only do you have to spend time solving the puzzle, but also waste time figuring out what the end goal itself should be in the first place. The help system is not particularly useful either, meaning you are basically on your own...which falsely extends the duration of the adventure.

One aspect of Sherlock Holmes and the Mystery of Osborne House that does prove to be a pleasant twist is the theories section where Holmes derives a few possible conclusions from the evidence found at crime scenes. Players must choose the theory they believe is the most accurate and back up the presumption by selecting key clues that support the logical thought process. Unfortunately, however, the majority of the title is sub-par for those that have already sampled far better puzzle adventures, like Professor Layton, CiNG’s latest release, Last Window: The Secret of Cape West, or even the three Ubisoft-published Crime Scene Investigation games (the third of which launches later this year).

Calling this Professor Layton Light Edition would be an insult to Level-5’s exemplary creation, since the majority of brain-teasers within are no match for enjoyable, taxing riddles Akira Tago pumps into the Layton adventures. However, anyone with a penchant for puzzle solving could do far worse than this mediocre effort, which can most likely be found at a bargain basement price now.