The Sherlock Holmes Games

Sherlock Holmes was never one game series. Four separate traditions share the Baker Street address, and they play nothing alike. The oldest are parser adventures, where a Doyle short story becomes a typing puzzle: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and its stablemates expect you to interrogate witnesses by typing questions and to keep your own notes, because nothing is highlighted for you.

The odd one out is 221B Baker Street, a conversion of the tabletop deduction game. Up to four players drive between London addresses, collect fragments of testimony, and the first to name culprit, motive and location wins. There is no story at all — it is a logic grid with a Victorian coat of paint.

Filmed actors, then icon bars

Consulting Detective took the most unusual route of the lot: instead of drawn graphics it plays filmed scenes with real actors, pulled off videodisc and later CD. You work through a London directory, choose who to visit, and at the end a courtroom quiz scores you against Holmes himself — visiting fewer leads scores better. Two further volumes followed the same format. The rival approach was the drawn adventure, and The Case of the Serrated Scalpel by Mythos Software is its best-known example, with a verb icon bar, Watson tagging along, and a chemistry bench for testing what you pick up. The Case of the Rose Tattoo continued it.

From 2002 the Ukrainian studio Frogwares rebuilt Holmes in 3D and pushed him outside the canon entirely, up to Sherlock Holmes versus Jack the Ripper. Many cases in this group run straight in your browser window, no install and no download — the parsers, the 221B board game and the Serrated Scalpel among them. The Frogwares titles and the later Consulting Detective volumes are here as catalogue profiles with descriptions and screenshots.