(no subject)

[commotiocordis]

A review of the www.221b.sh Sherlock Holmes tie-in webgame.

You may have been bothered by the increase in Tweeting lately copied over to my LJ, most of which probably made no sense. They were bleakone and I going to town on this game and peppering up the normal, required discussion between partners with. . . you know, normal required discussion between partners. Because that's totes how these two roll, no lies. Anyway, I'm planning to clean that up and turn it into some kind of post at some point--though ficcing the entire thing would be far too much effort (it covers some 4 months-ish of character time), adding in basic annotations to explain what's happening in the case so people can lolz at our ability to sex it up Victorian England murder scenes is hardly out of the question.

But a review of the game itself (copypasted from a site that I posted it on, which is why the beginning is exactly what I've explained above):

As someone who totally missed this until after seeing the movie, I still found it an incredible bit of fun to play all the way though. I wish they had enumerated the reputation levels at the beginning, however, as I would have bet higher earlier on had I known that there is a jump from 30,000’s “Unquestionable” to 100,000 for “World Famous”. I spent a not-inconsiderable amount of time playing through the entire thing–it took me about a week, I think, but my Watson and I were more or less role-playing via Twitter the entire time to accompany our gameplay, which probably slowed us down a bit.

Communication is definitely necessary, as the game often states–there is information perhaps not vital, but definitely helpful that is only relayed to the interviewing character and not recorded in the case notes, so one’s partner is not privy to it without direct tête-à-tête between a Holmes and his Watson. Based on what I’ve seen, playing as Holmes, I feel like Watson had a harder time of it and often more to do per chapter, to be honest–the interview segments were mostly Watson’s purview, and unlike the “chase somebody” or “sneak around and pick locks” segments, information is required prior to success in these, often information from one’s partner’s casefile.

Anyway, to quash my inherent verbosity and leave you with a summary of my opinion, A++ WOULD WILL PLAY AGAIN. I’m interested to try my hand at the interview segments of Watson’s (though I know all the deductions, I don’t know exactly what my partner had to ask in these tasks), though I’ll probably wait until right before the DVD comes out so I don’t remember *all* the answers. Hopefully, it will still be around for a while to come. I really hope they find some way to incorporate it on the DVD itself, because though this doesn't have multiple outcomes/tasks, so when you know the answers you know the answers, it really does directly correspond to the beginning of the movie--all this work is to track down the murderer that we find Watson and Holmes hot on the trail of during the opening scene of the film. This much backstory, richly interwoven with not-easy puzzles and awesome movie cut-scenes, should not be lost to the internets.