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After successfully completing its first console-focused Sherlock Holmes game, The Testament of Sherlock Holmes<\/em>, which we reviewed as “a wonderful adventure game” last fall,<\/a> Frogwares continues its push to evolve the world’s most famous fictional detective within the video game space.<\/p>\n

This week, Frogwares and publisher Focus Home unveiled their next Sherlock Holmes game, Crimes & Punishments<\/em>. Crimes & Punishments<\/em> will build upon the true third-person design of The Testament of Sherlock Holmes<\/em> and, strangely, will also ditch Frogwares’ homemade graphics engine for the first time in favor of Unreal Engine 3 technology as the studio veers away from the vintage 60s character design to create a modernized Sherlock Holmes. This will supposedly allow for vast improvements in graphical quality:<\/p>\n

Environments will be more realistic and finely detailed with dynamic lighting and shadows. Choosing this engine also lets the game benefit from many technologies like a powerful animation engine for smooth movement and animation transitions, real-time shaders and a particle system, and advanced post-processing effects.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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I don’t know how I feel about this to be honest, especially since The Testament of Sherlock Holmes<\/em> already has richly detailed graphics and a distinct visual identity. Too many games that jump on the UE3 ship end up with buggy texture glitches and a general lack of artistic soul that proprietary engines always seem to have. I kind of get that impression from the early screenshots too. Some of the scenes almost look more like Alan Wake<\/em> than anything else.<\/p>\n

As for the game itself, Crimes & Punishments<\/em> will consist of eight different cases of murder, missing persons, and theft to investigate and solve. Solving cases will give players freedom to make deep moral choices that will directly impact Holmes’ reputation. Making decisions and living with the consequences, good or bad, will be a driving force behind the game’s storyline. I like the sound of that.<\/p>\n

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A time frame for release has not yet been confirmed, but Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments<\/em> is currently in development for PC, PS3 and Xbox 360. Maybe we’ll get the opportunity to interview Frogwares again and learn more about some of the changes being made. Regardless, we’ll keep you up to date as new details are announced. Stay tuned, mystery adventure fans!<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After successfully completing its first console-focused Sherlock Holmes game, The Testament of Sherlock Holmes, which we reviewed as “a wonderful adventure game” last fall, Frogwares continues its push to evolve the world’s most famous fictional detective within the video game space. This week, Frogwares and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[149,2,23,49,74,21],"tags":[1219,6132,821,6081,6094,696,6102,3787,3937,6079],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.vgblogger.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19760"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.vgblogger.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.vgblogger.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.vgblogger.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.vgblogger.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19760"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.vgblogger.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19760\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19764,"href":"http:\/\/www.vgblogger.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19760\/revisions\/19764"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.vgblogger.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19760"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.vgblogger.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19760"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.vgblogger.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19760"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}