MINI-REVIEW: Sherlock Holmes: Nemesis / Sherlock Holmes vs Arsene Lupin
Andrew Plotkin
(Review copyright 2008, Andrew Plotkin <erky...@eblong.com>)
I played _Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened_ last year, but never got around to
a review. Now I've played _Nemesis_, which gives me an excuse to patch my
gap -- the two games play very similarly. But their tones are rather
different.
_Awakened_ led Holmes to investigate various dank backwaters of the world,
in which a shadowy cult was conducting revolting work. This led to rituals,
unspeakable runes, forbidden knowledge, squamousness and rugosity, and all
the eventual trappings of H. P. Lovecraft.
The _Nemesis_, in contrast, is Arsene Lupin. This is, of course, the famous
gentleman thief, whose stories (written by Maurice Leblanc) were appearing
in the same era as Conan Doyle's detective. I say "of course" because you
probably haven't heard of him. Although if you're an anime fan, you're
probably slapping your forehead and saying "Ah! The grandfather of Lupin
III!" If you still have no idea what I'm talking about, imagine a French guy
in a top hat, stealing things and being cool. That's all you need.
So there's nothing unspeakable here. (Although a few plot straws from
_Awakened_ are still smouldering on the back burner, if I may knot a
metaphor.) The Great Thief challenges the Great Detective, and that means a
game. You lead Holmes around London, on a trail of clues and puzzles that
were quite deliberately left for him. _Nemesis_, in other words, has the
form of a puzzle scavenger hunt rather than a mystery story.
This isn't as much difference as all that. Every adventure game is secretly
a puzzle scavenger hunt; that's the conceit that we agree to ignore. But
_Nemesis_ gets to ignore it in your face, because an egotistical thief
leaving clues is an even better excuse than a mad pharaoh building traps in
his pyramid. Sure, the *tone* of chasing a raffish dandy with his jokes and
riddles is the antithesis of rugoseness and squamosity. Watson isn't going
to get any new nightmares from this one. But the actual sorts of puzzles you
encounter in the two games are similar.
You have your basic Holmesian detectivation. In these scenes, you wander
around and keep an eye out for footprints, smears of mud, scattered hairs,
scraps of paper -- the usual suspects. Anything that's out of place. When
you find one, you get to pore over it with the old magnifying glass: same
search, different scale. In some cases you can gather samples; in others,
you can measure marks with your measuring tape. Now, the gathering and
measuring is basically gesture-fluff. The tools are obvious, so the game is
all in seeing relevant details. But it's good gesture-fluff. It's fun, it
lets you feel like a detective, and there are never so many tools that the
scene gets tedious. (Well, not in _Nemesis_. I think there was some tool
overload in _Awakened_, but I don't remember the details and obviously the
designers got over it.)
The problem with these scenes is that the clues are always plot milestones.
You have to find every one to proceed with the game. And it's not possible
to play one of these games without missing at least one clue. Which means,
you'll get stuck. It just happens. Being a Great Detective is a lot harder
than being a Pretty Good Detective Most Of The Time.
Object-combination puzzles and funny-machine puzzles allow for
experimentation. You can come close and see some sort of result; failure can
give you information. Search puzzles are not like that. Either you're
standing near the hotspot and looking in the right direction, or you're not.
If you're not, you have no idea what to try to get unstuck. So keep the
walkthough handy, and don't feel embarrassed about hitting it.
(Actually, I can imagine ways for the game to nudge you. Say, if you walk
within ten feet of a clue three times without noticing it, the game drops a
voiceover hint: "I sense something near here." "Is that something there on
the ground?" Great Detectives have hunches like that. It would open up an
avenue for brute-force solving, but I think it wouldn't spoil the
experience, as long as the hints were phrased to narrow the area of your
search -- rather than solving the puzzle for you.)
Speaking of object-combination puzzles and funny-machine puzzles, you will
find plenty of those too. And symbol-association puzzles, and even classic
logic puzzles, of which _Nemesis_ works in an impressive variety. (I'd say
that the raffish puzzle-leaving thief is to blame for those, but it seems
they're just as likely to show up in the regular business of London. Imagine
N guards with N characteristics assigned to N lockers...)
The best I can say for the puzzles is that they cover a huge range. The
worst I can say is that they cover a huge range of obscurity. Some are easy,
some are hard, some are overspecified, some are underclued. Some are even
badly implemented, or inconsistently implemented. As a designer I accept
that it's *really hard* to regulate difficulty across so many puzzles. As a
player, I say the result is kind of annoying anyway. Once again, I got stuck
in several places, and I think you will get stuck too. Not necessarily in
the same places, of course.
Unfortunately, the hazard of getting stuck on a poor puzzle -- and then
looking up the answer, to find that it *is* a poor puzzle -- is that you
lose some faith in the game. (Being a Great Designer is a lot harder than
being a Pretty Good Designer Most Of The Time...) I enjoyed some of the
puzzles in _Nemesis_, and I found some routine, and I disliked some. Which
left me with an overall poor impression of the game, because the more I
stumbled the less patience I had. It's not exactly fair; but there it is.
And that brings me to the final puzzle -- no, actually, it doesn't yet.
First, the query puzzles. And second, the dialogue.
Query puzzles are a trick I first saw in _Agon_. (Which, come to think of
it, is where I first described the search-puzzle problem. Ah, 2003.) Holmes
turns to you -- "you" being Watson, in these scenes -- and asks you what you
think of the latest riddle, set of clues, what have you. Then an input box
pops up. Type the answer, a word or so, and the game proceeds. If you have
no idea what's going on, the game lets you pop out of the query
(right-click, which I had trouble finding at first) and look through your
in-game notebooks for background information.
I praised this query trick in _Agon_ because it sidesteps the whole design
problem of proving you know the answer. If the clue points to the locale of
Lupin's next crime, you can't just wander randomly around the game map; you
have to type the name. If the point is to notice that a message contains
hidden information, you don't need a contrived scene in which that
information is *useful*; you merely type it and add a clue to your web of
deduction.
(Mind you, there *is* a game map. While you can't wander around it randomly,
you *can* click landmarks randomly and be refused entry. This sometimes
undercuts the queries -- particularly if you deduce ahead of the game. At
one point I had figured out the next theft target long before the plot
wanted me to. The map wouldn't let me go there; I had to run a gauntlet of
research and queries. In another case, I was typing the wrong answer to a
query, because the game was expecting me to follow its step-by-step logic,
and I was again a step ahead.)
_Agon_ used the query model to separate *your* solving the puzzle from the
*protagonist's* solving. You do the work, and then the protagonist has his
moment of insight and moves on with the plot; which makes for better pacing.
In the Holmes games, of course, this separation is built in: Holmes is
always a step ahead of Watson. Cue Conan-Doylian banter. Unless, again, the
player is ahead of Holmes, and then the pacing doesn't work so well.
Speaking of banter. These games have a lot of NPCs, and a lot of dialogue.
Unusually for modern adventure games, they *don't* have *too much* dialogue.
The dialogue sets up each scene and carries the game plot, but each bit is
short and hits its mark; they're spread around between characters and across
the game action. No verbose boulders of backstory rolled across you for
hours on end. Plus, it's well-translated and well-spoken -- attributes which
I no longer take for granted.
This is not to say there are no down-sides. The script leans way, way too
heavily on cod-Sherlockian boilerplate. "The game is afoot" a dozen times a
day; "elementary" erupts like attacks of hiccups. Famous lines are strewn
randomly. (I can cope with one more reminder that the tobacco is in the
Persian slipper; but, really, do we have to hear again about "*the* woman"?)
And while the NPCs you meet are many and varied, and mostly amusing, some
wind up sending you to the dread land of the fetch-quest. Yes, it's just
another kind of puzzle, but one which I'd rather kept to its bare minimum.
Adventure games have enough trouble interweaving their puzzles with their
plots, without dropping those plots for three irrelevant chores per chapter.
(Even the Sam&Max series, the current zenith of That Sort of Game, makes an
effort to keep the quests both funny, in that Sam&Max over-the-top way, and
ultimately relevant to the current storyline. In _Nemesis_, Holmes winds up
making dog-food and then finding the maidservant's dolls. Sadly, it isn't as
salacious as I'm making it sound.)
I am left with the final puzzle -- about which I don't know what to think.
I shouldn't say the *final* puzzle, really. It's the puzzle that sets up the
final chapter of the game. It's the "now everything changes" line: no more
clues and riddles; Holmes vs Lupin in earnest. And it's the puzzle where
(not to spoil anything) you have to jump out of the framework and think
about what's really going on.
I love this trick. I try to do this in *my* games, and I sometimes succeed,
and I am most pleased with myself when I do. But in _Nemesis_, the trick did
not succeed... for me. I tried a random answer, which was wrong; then I
tried the decoy answer, which was wrong; then I tried another random answer,
which seemed like it might not be entirely wrong, and it turned out to be
right. So you can credit my subconscious mind for being clever -- but I
really hadn't worked through the logic, and I didn't understand why I was
right until the Holmes-explains-everything speech. And then I crossed out
the "totally unprompted final twist" that I had written in my review notes.
It *did* make sense, but I got stuck in Watson's shoes -- enlightenment
after the fact.
So I didn't have the ideal experience, and whose fault was that? It can
easily be mine; I never gave _Nemesis_ credit for having layers, and so I
never looked for them. It's equally easy to blame the designers, for not
putting in enough clues. Or maybe I should just say that I'm good at puzzles
but lousy at mysteries. (Which is true: mystery novels always outmaneuver
me.) And maybe I should shut up and take my lumps; I've read dozens of
comments like these about the games that *I* write.
I'll leave that to you, but I can point at one angle which felt wrong. When
you give a wrong answer in that critical puzzle, you do not get immediate
feedback. Instead, you get a rather long cut-scene which at first seems like
you're on the right track; then you slowly realize that you're not; and then
the game ends (and resets you to the puzzle point). Narratively, this makes
perfect sense -- you're waiting for Lupin in the wrong place. Design-wise,
it's plausible -- failing a crucial puzzle should have some cost, although
the framework should (and does) let you try again.
But it went wrong for me in a couple of ways. First, there's a line in the
bad-ending cut-scene which I completely misinterpreted -- I thought it was a
*good* sign, and so the "you lose" screen a minute later left me
disgruntled. And second, the good-choice cut-scene is insufficiently
different from the bad-choice one. So when I hit *that*, I thought it was a
*bad* sign -- and a minute later I was into the final chapter, and *that*
left me disgruntled too. And finally, of course, boredom is a dangerous cost
to inflict. Repeating scenes, even for game-appropriate reasons, can amplify
the no-fun factor for any player who is running into trouble.
These are very fine hairs to dissect, and perhaps too personal a reaction
for the designers to address. I'm sure *some* players hit the desired moment
of insight, and any change that rescues my game might perhaps ruin theirs.
Nonetheless, I found _Nemesis_ less good than it should have been, and that
is a sad review no matter how you slice it. The reasons for my negativity
were many and perhaps picayune, but they added up. And the same is true of
_Awakened_ (although that had a much more traditional final-chapter puzzle
blowout.) To counterbalance that, I will say that both games have a great
many good points; they're big, plotty, puzzly, visually rich, and (mostly)
well-written. So what are you going to do? Play them, I guess.
(This review, and my reviews of other adventure games, are at
http://eblong.com/zarf/gamerev/index.html)
--Z
--
"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the borogoves..."
*
Sig repository offline for update...
MetalGuru
> MINI-REVIEW: Sherlock Holmes: Nemesis / Sherlock Holmes vs
> Arsene Lupin
> (Review copyright 2008, Andrew Plotkin <erky...@eblong.com>)
> http://eblong.com/zarf/gamerev/index.html)
<snip well written and very informative review>
Thanks for this and all other reviews you've posted over the years, I always
enjoy reading them. But I think you can safely drop the "MINI" prefix by
now, yours are usually longer and more in-depth than many reviews posted at
some major gaming sites :)
Andrew Plotkin
>
> Thanks for this and all other reviews you've posted over the years, I always
> enjoy reading them.
You're welcome. :)
> But I think you can safely drop the "MINI" prefix by now, yours are
> usually longer and more in-depth than many reviews posted at some
> major gaming sites :)
I have an actual criterion for the "mini" label. A full review is one
where I go through a bunch of axes -- graphics, sound, plot, writing,
puzzles, etc -- and talk about how the game works in each aspect. In a
mini-review, I just talk about whichever bits strike my fancy. (In a
non-review, I talk about why I didn't bother playing or finishing the
game.)
Now, I haven't gone the "full" route in years; I'm not interested in
doing that style of analysis any more. And as you say, length has
nothing to do with it. But consistency is all I ask, so I keep using
the labels the way I've always used them.
Besides, it's funny. :)