14 DAY TRIAL // Developer Frogwares has released a new video of Sherlock Holmes: Crimes & Punishment being played on Sony's next-gen computer entertainment system, the PlayStation 4.
The video is a rather lengthy 23-minute piece, featuring gameplay footage from the upcoming game and commentary describing what's going on.
Taking the source material to heart, Frogwares' game is set in 19th century London, and its title is a nod to Dostoyevsky's novel "Crime and Punishment," hinting at the fact that players will have to make a moral choice of absolving or condemning the individual responsible for the murders that they'll be investigating.
The game follows author Arthur Conan Doyle's novels, and is split into seven different cases, including murders, theft, disappearances, and other such crimes.
Sherlock Holmes: Crimes & Punishments makes a fine display of the protagonist's eccentricity, as well as of the way processes float around in his head and help him make connections between the things he notices, and the cinematic approach as well as the leap in visual quality will definitely make the game much more of a hit than its predecessors.
Frogwares has a long history of making crime-solving games set to the Sherlock Holmes ethos, as Crimes & Punishments will be the seventh iteration in the series, but this time around the developer has decided to give the game a much more scrupulous visual polish, making it the first game built on Unreal Engine 3.
Additionally, inspired by the recent Sherlock Holmes movies and by BBC's modern-day Sherlock interpretation, the developers have taken a step sideways from the classic '60s movies Sherlock Holmes and decided to replace him with a more modern character.
Each of the cases will offer players freedom to investigate, pinpoint the culprit and then make a moral choice of whether to allow the criminal to go free, on the reasoning that his actions were justified, or to deliver them to the law enforcers.
All decisions will influence the way the events in the game unfold, affecting your character's reputation, and even having unforeseen and unexpected consequences, revealing the true depth of every choice you have to make.
The series is famous for the thought-provoking adventure gameplay, with an emphasis on exploration, and the latest episode offers a wealth of investigation mechanics, allowing Sherlock's investigative skills to determine what happened at a crime scene by simply looking at the subjects and carefully observing all the details, piecing the truth bit by bit.
Sherlock Holmes: Crimes & Punishments is scheduled to come out on September 2, 2014, for the Windows PC, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One platforms.
