GOGathon: Frogwares’ Sophisticated Sleuthing

Time for another dip into Frogwares’ Sherlock Holmes series. After humble beginnings, Frogwares had managed to develop the series into something more ambitious, with The Testament of Sherlock Holmes providing the most cinematic experience yet in the series. For their next games, they would shift gears again, simultaneously upping the production values whilst shifting more towards episodic plot structures. Would this be another fruitful reinvention for the series, or a bridge too far? Let’s see…

Crimes and Punishments

It’s the mid-1890s – spanning a period before and after the events of The Testament of Sherlock Holmes. Holmes and Watson are doing what they do best – taking on cases, offering their solutions, and proposing resolutions to the matters at hand. As Holmes works his way through a series of standalone cases, his brother Mycroft is bothering him to undertake a bit of work for the government – plumbing the mystery of the Merry Men, a group of radicals who appear to be up to something or other.

Still, as the traces of the Merry Men’s work crop up here and there, matters seem to be coming to a head – and when the elder brother of Wiggins, leader of the Baker Street Irregulars, is caught up in a murder investigation, the trail ultimately leads Sherlock to a direct confrontation with the Merry Men. Will he buy into their rhetoric about robbing from the rich to inspire the poor, or will he consign them to a hands of a system out to defend the status quo at the expense of everyone else?

GOGathon: The Frog’s Afoot, Watson!

The story so far: the first three games in Frogwares’ Sherlock Holmes series each had a different presentation. Mystery of the Mummy was very much a Myst-alike, whilst The Case of the Silver Earring presented a classic-style point-and-click adventure. Then the Cthulhu Mythos-themed The Awakened jumped forward into the world of first-person realtime-rendered 3D, though in its Remastered version it also provided an alternative point-and-click third person viewpoint and control system.

With The Awakened being well-received, Frogwares realised they were onto something, and they fairly rapidly set to work on sequels. For this tranche of reviews, I’m going to dip into the other two games they made using the same general presentation as The Awakened, plus the game which saw their next big leap into more modern styles of presentation.

Sherlock Holmes: Nemesis (AKA Sherlock Holmes vs. Arsene Lupin)

It is 1895, a year after Holmes and Watson had their terrifying encounter with the devotees of Cthulhu. Holmes is feeling that old craving for opiates a juicy new case, and as chance would have it, a juicy new case is actively seeking his attention – for he receives a note from none other than Arsene Lupin, the famed French master thief. Lupin’s note is a taunting declaration that over the next five mights, Lupin is going to carry out a series of daring heists across London, with the intent of destroying national pride and making the British the laughing stock of the world. (My dude, just wait 120 years, we’ll do it ourselves just fine.)

The note also flatters Holmes by declaring him the only person who might have the wit to stop Lupin – but is Lupin overestimating Holmes? Night after night, Holmes, Watson, and Inspector Lestrade find themselves one step behind Lupin and powerless to do anything other than follow the trail of clues to the site of the next heist. Will the final score be France 5, England Nil, or will Holmes be able to save the day?

GOGathon: Elementary, My Dear Frogwares

As I think I’ve well-substantiated in past articles, it’s arguably a fallacy to say that old school adventure games went extinct in the late 1990s/early 2000s. It’s truer to say that studios which had previously taken the lead in the field such as LucasArts and Sierra pivoted away from the genre to produce games which delivered bigger returns on investment instead, ceding the market to smaller developers instead.

Those smaller developers, precisely because of the lower budgets and smaller teams they were working with, weren’t able to produce the sort of triple-A games which were yielding those big returns the massive studios were chasing – but they could make entirely adequate adventure games to serve a market more than happy to pay for them, and which yielded returns which may not have been worth the time of the top-tier studios to chase but were more than adequate to keep the lights on for a smaller concern.

Of course, smaller developers, precisely by virtue of having less budget, can’t quite bring the same level of marketing to bear as a major studio – which explains the impression that adventure games had suddenly vanished, because with the big developers pulling out of the genre it meant you had to look a little harder to find new releases, and there was a lot of new hotness out there with more advertising behind it to distract you before you got there.

Between this and the somewhat more modest presentation necessitated by lower budgets, perhaps a big reason I missed out on a lot of adventure games in the 2000s was because so many of them looked like fairly cheap offerings with zero marketing behind them – making it very difficult for them to stand out from the swathes of honest to goodness shovelware that flooded the market at the time.

All this goes a long way towards explaining why I’ve slept on Frogwares’ series of Sherlock Holmes-themed games up until now. Frogwares – based out of Ukraine and Ireland, established by French ex-pats – got their big break on the market via their Sherlock Holmes games, and it’s remained the backbone of their portfolio to this day. Of the 15 games Frogwares have developed under their own name, 9 have been Sherlock Holmes releases; Holmes also accounts for 4 of the 9 games they put out under their Waterlily sub-studio, which concentrates on casual puzzlers and hidden object games (though I’m not going to bother with the mostly handheld-only casual games).

Nonetheless, the combination of a mid-budget studio, cheap and cheerful packaging, and the use of a thoroughly public domain character (though the last few Holmes stories only slipped into the public domain in the US surprisingly recently) all conspired to make the whole setup look like shovelware fodder. Apparently, though, that isn’t the case – some of the games in the series are quite well-regarded, and with GOG offering a bundle of most of them a while back, I decided to take the plunge then.

Even then, it took me a while to get around to taking a look – was it worth the wait, or was the less than £40 I ended up spending for the series still too much? For this article, I’m going to click through the first three games and see how Frogwares laid the foundations of the series.

The Mystery of the Mummy

Holmes’ cousin is about to marry Elisabeth Montcalfe – daughter of Lord Montcalfe, the celebrated Egyptologist Lord Montcalfe, who died recently in an apparent self-immolation. Since they are about to be family, Elisabeth brings Holmes into her confidence: she believes that there was something suspicious about Lord Montcalfe’s death, and she would like Holmes to investigate with maximum discretion.

This will be no problem, for Watson is away on holiday with his wife, making this the perfect time for Sherlock to investigate the matter solo. Elisabeth arranges for Holmes to be given access to Lord Montcalfe’s mansion, but unfortunately there’s a hitch – many areas of the mansion are locked, and towards the end of his life Lord Montcalfe became increasingly paranoid, and filled his house with dangerous traps. Sherlock will have to use all his deductive skill to stay ahead of the traps, gain access to the inner reaches of the house, and discover the truth…

The Holmes Canon, Part 7: Distracted By Fairies, Frustrated By Formula

After taking a break from Sherlock Holmes for some four years after His Last Bow, Arthur Conan Doyle would make his return to the series in 1921. In the intervening time, however, his entire public persona, and the main thrust of his professional work, had undertaken a fundamental shift. To a public which largely knew him as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, it may have appeared that he’d undergone a rapid personal transformation. Previously, he had been a paragon of rationality who applied the same techniques of logical deduction he used in his fiction in real-life cases, famously assisting to reverse several miscarriages of justice; now he was an avowed Spiritualist, eagerly promoting the faith (which had become resurgent after its early 20th Century doldrums thanks to the trauma of World War I) and proclaiming the reality of a range of paranormal phenomena.

This, however, would be an oversimplification of the truth. As far back as 1887, Doyle had been attending seances and occasionally writing to the Spiritualist journal Light; in the 1890s he joined the Society for Psychical Research and undertook a spot of ghost-hunting. Up until the war years, Spiritualism would seem to have been one of Doyle’s many interests, and never one of his primary ones.

Another common myth about Doyle is that the catalysing factor for his turn to Spiritualism was the deaths of a great many family members in the War. Whilst it’s likely to be the case that several people of Doyle’s acquaintance died in the early War (after all, it was a meat-grinder that ate up an entire generation), most of the deaths of those closest to him – his brother, son, two brothers-in-law, and two nephews – all occurred after 1916, when he made his big turn to Spiritualism. The actual incident which prompted him to step up his involvement in the field involved his children’s nanny, Lily Loder Symonds, who seemed to have spontaneously become a medium and started producing psychic phenomena such as automatic writing. Doyle was sufficiently convinced by her to write to Light and proclaim that Spiritualism was a “new revelation” (a title he would later use for a book on the subject), sent by Providence for the relief of an embattled world.

Doyle in a “spirit photograph” taken by medium Ada Deane; the near-total mismatch in size between Doyle and the ghost behind him suggests a double exposure.

Even then, his new enthusiasm for Spiritualism would not have necessarily been that obvious at that stage, because as well as putting out stuff like His Last Bow Doyle was also producing a large amount of war writing, including essays penned on a tour of the front in 1916, and obviously for as long as the War lasted (and a little beyond the ceasefire) Doyle had so much work to do on that subject that his new enthusiasm for Spiritualism was a drop in the ocean compared to his essays and writing on other subjects. A glance over his essays and letters over the years makes this apparent: the Spiritualist stuff is vastly outweighed by war writing in 1916 to the end of the War, then there’s a time when it competes with various other interests of his, but by 1920 it has come to dominate his output.

If the deaths I have mentioned above have a role in this, it would seem to be less to trigger a conversion (Doyle was already inclined to believe in Spiritualism and had merely become more emphatic in that belief) and more to prompt him to double down on his convictions. You could make a comparison to the way people seem to snap these days over QAnon stuff and related conspiracy theories: the world is in tulmult, it’s all quite scary, that comes with a number of personal setbacks, you’re casting about for something which makes this all make sense, once you find it you commit to it regardless of logic or evidence.

Ah yes, about that…

The Holmes Canon, Part 6: Fearful Valleys and Less-Than-Final Bows

So far, my process of reading the Sherlock Holmes canon in order of publication has been fairly smooth. First up were A Study In Scarlet and The Sign of the Four, which using a TV analogy I’ve described as the “feature-length pilot episodes”. Continuing that analogy, we’ve had season 1 – The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, season 2 – The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, a long break followed by a season 3 which presented one continuous story like a “special event series” (The Hound of the Baskervilles), and a season 4 – The Return of Sherlock Holmes – which went back to business as usual.

After this, however, Doyle’s output of Sherlock Holmes stories would become patchier. He’d never do a “season” of 12 or so adventures issued more-or-less monthly like he did for the Adventures, Memoirs, and Return ever again. Instead, he would put out stories as and when he felt like it – either because he wanted the money which he could count on being paid for a Holmes story, or because he had a story idea which appealed to him where Holmes seemed to be the right tool for the job. To continue my TV analogy, it’s like the regular seasons of the show have ceased, but occasional one-off specials or small clusters of episodes pop up here and there on the schedules because the production company can’t quite greenlight a full new season but don’t want to let it 100% die.

The two “pilot episodes” were penned in 1886-1890; season 1 ran from 1891-1892, season 2 from 1892-1893, season 3 from 1901-1902, and season 4 from 1903-1904. By comparison, the run of stories I am going to cover here run from 1908 to 1917; as it turns out, this will be the longest span of time of any of the articles in this series (the concluding article, where I contemplate The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, will cover 1921-1927). The bulk of this time period is covered by the first six of the seven stories in the collection His Last Bow. (Note that some editions of His Last Bow have eight stories, with the addition of The Cardboard Box, but as I related in my review of the Memoirs that’s really a season 2 story.) Then, annoyingly for my writing process, Doyle finally did a full “season 5” in the form of the novel The Valley of Fear, once again serialised in Strand, before we jump back to His Last Bow for the title story in the collection.

This big jump in time raises an interesting point about internal chronology. His Last Bow – the story itself – is set in 1914, fairly close to its date of publication, what with it being a World War I propaganda tale. This is in keeping with the bulk of the stories in the pilot episodes and seasons 1 and 2, which establish Watson and Holmes’ initial partnership as running from 1881 (Watson’s return to England after his war service in Afghanistan) to 1891 (Holmes does his vanishing act at the Reichenbach Falls). We can call this the era of the Adventures and Memoirs. Hound of the Baskervilles was set during this time period, and the stories in the Return establish Watson and Holmes’ second major partnership as running from 1894 (Holmes’ return in The Empty House) to no later than 1904; we can call this the Return era.

As mentioned, the story His Last Bow is not set in either of these two major eras – it’s Holmes coming out of retirement for one last major investigation – but the rest of the tales told in this span of time are set between 1881 and 1904, a time period which was retreating further and further into the past as time went by. As a result, Doyle is transitioning out of writing Holmes stories as contemporary crime thrillers and increasingly shifting into presenting them as period pieces, snapshots of a time period which many of his readers would still remember but which would still feel like a long time ago given the widespread social and technological changes that had occurred since.

The Holmes Canon, Part 5: Reichenbach Retcon

The story so far, filtered through an analogy which treats the Sherlock Holmes canon like a television series: after two novels functioning as feature-length pilot episodes, Conan Doyle delivered not one but two full seasons of Sherlock Holmes adventures, at the end of which Holmes was killed off. Doyle had not escaped his most famous creation, however; after nearly eight years of freedom, he bowed to the inevitable and produced The Hound of the Baskervilles, whose original serial appearance can be seen as season 3.

This was such a howling success that the long-simmering demand for a full return of Holmes became irresistible; legend has it that Doyle named an absurd amount of money as the price to bring Holmes back from the dead, and to his shock his publishers said “Yes, sure”, so he relented and began the run of stories, commencing in October 1903, which would later be compiled as The Return of Sherlock Holmes – or which we can call for the purposes of the TV series analogy “season 4”.

The Empty House is the story which sets up Holmes’ return – set in 1894, it establishes that his period of exile must have only been about three years or so. It is, at least, an improvement on The Final Problem: there is an actual clash of wits involved (this time against a surviving member of Moriarty’s inner circle), there is actual deduction.

At the same time, it really feels like Doyle is phoning this one in. For one thing, there’s a howling great continuity error – Moriarty is referred to as “James Moriarty”, which The Final Problem establishes as being the name of the Professor’s brother; whilst fathers and sons sharing a name is far from unknown, it seems absurd for parents to give two siblings the exact same name. We’ve long established that Doyle was just a bit shit about inter-story continuity, due to his general refusal to properly review older tales, but this really takes the cake: if he can’t be arsed to get his Moriarty facts straight in a story which is a direct sequel to The Final Problem, that seems astonishingly lazy.

The story is also notable for the way it informs the reader about Mary Watson’s death at some point during the Great Hiatus: namely, by tossing it in as a brief sentence whilst Holmes and Watson are catching up, with not a mention of Watson being a widower before or after. The story doesn’t even do her the courtesy of mentioning her name. Theorists might come up with proposals about Watson having had another wife at this point in time off the back of that, but I think it far more likely that Doyle simply forgot her name and couldn’t be arsed to pull out his author’s copy of The Sign of the Four to check.

On the whole, between this callousness and the aforementioned continuity sloppiness, this isn’t a promising start to the season. Doyle going in even further on hyping up the importance of heredity – having Holmes theorise that the villain of the tale went bad because one of his ancestors was bad, in particular – adds a further distasteful note. This does not bode well for what follows, but then again The Final Problem was a notable step down from the rest of The Memoirs (and that was in the context of a highly patchy season, at that).

The Holmes Canon, Part 4: Doggedly Refusing To Retcon Reichenbach

After shoving Sherlock Holmes off a cliff at the end of The Final Problem in 1893, Arthur Conan Doyle thought he was free. Disregarding the pleas of fans, he spent nearly 8 years working on other projects, like his comedic Brigadier Gerard stories, the Round the Fire series of horror/thrillers, and volunteering as a medic in the Boer War. One imagines him battling in a field hospital to save the life of a grievously wounded soldier, only for the patient to say “Aren’t you Arthur Conan Doyle? You should bring back Sherlock Hol-gurk“… Doyle stands up, pockets a bloodied scalpel… “There was nothing I could do for this one,” he declares, “send in the next…”

Returning to Britain after the latter, he was inspired by some local folklore to pen a mystery novel revolving around legends of a monstrous hound that haunts an accursed noble family. As Doyle developed his tangled narrative, he realised at some point he’d need to have a character come in and resolve the mystery. As tempting as it surely was to just create a different detective, Doyle ultimately could not deny the logic of having Holmes take the role. He had not yet retconned away The Final Problem‘s conclusion – the new story, The Hound of the Baskervilles, would be set prior to that – but having once brought Holmes back, it became all the harder for him to resist the piles of money being offered him to resurrect him full time.

To continue the analogy to a TV series I’ve been playing with throughout these articles, if A Study In Scarlet and The Sign of the Four were feature-length pilot episodes and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes can be seen as “season 1” and “season 2” (with their compilation in book form being the DVD boxed sets), what does that make Hound? It is tempting to see it as the big box office movie adaptation – not least because it is one of the most frequently adapted Holmes stories in cinema. However, this is to lose sight of how it was originally published – namely, as a 9-part serial in Holmes’ old home of the Strand, constituting a “season 3” that happened to be based around one single story. (In other words, it’s the sort of thing which would be marketed today as a “special event series”, like the third season of Twin Peaks.)

Whichever way you jump on that thought experiment, there’s no denying that Hound is an entirely different beast from the short stories, but also stands apart from the two previous Holmes novels. Unlike Scarlet or Sign, there’s no long flashback section in which the villain of the piece gives their personal sob story – indeed, the culprit never confesses in this, and it falls to Holmes himself in the last chapter to recap the story and explain what he has researched and deduced of the perpetrator’s personal history. Both of the earlier novels really feel more like novellas in length (they were, after all, originally published as the lead stories in magazines, and had to be over and done with in one go with enough space left over for the rest of the magazine’s content), and even then they feel padded-out, needing the long flashbacks to hit their page count. By contrast, Hound feels like a substantial story which justifies its page count, and lacks filler material altogether.

The Holmes Canon, Part 3: Holmes Dies At the End

Previously in this article series, I made the analogy that the first two Sherlock Holmes novels were like feature-length pilot episodes for a television series for which the initial run of stories in The Strand Magazine, as collected in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, can be seen as constituting the first “season”; following this logic, the stories published in Strand from December 1892 to December 1893 and collected in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes constitute season 2.

If my television metaphor is a little anachronistic, it does have the advantage that the popular reception of the Sherlock Holmes series feels ver much like an early, very ahead-of-its-time prototype of modern fandom, and it’s this season where that becomes strikingly apparent. You see, this is the season where Doyle decided to kill off Holmes – and had Holmes been like any other literary figure from the preceding few centuries, that would absolutely be the end of it. Readers might or might not approve, but it seems unlikely that they would have, say, lobbied Charles Dickens to put out a Bleak House 2 which retconned away the outcome of the Jarndyce and Jarndyce case. People responded to the Holmes stories – and thus, to Doyle – differently from the way they responded to prior literary works and their authors, and that’s fascinating.

You know what’s even more fascinating? The way that fandom had an impact on the stories themselves. After all – spoiler alert for a plot twist older than anyone living on Earth today – Holmes got brought back in the end. Furthermore, in reading the Memoirs I believe detect in some of Watson’s narration a little nod here and there to feedback which Doyle was receiving at the time. The season 1 finale, The Copper Beeches, ran in June 1892, and season 2 debuted in December 1892; Doyle had around half a year to not only take a break from cranking out one detective story per month, but also to hear readers’ feedback and to be influenced by it.

Sure, Dickens was writing in episodic form and could have been influenced by feedback similarly – but his serialised works were novels, and there was surely a limit to which he could really change course after establishing threads in early episodes. Perhaps some things might get emphasised or played down to match popular demand, but it seems unthinkable that Dickens would have radically changed the ending to any of his novels in light of an outcry by his readers. In working in a short story format, however, Doyle was in a position to adapt his work to his audience’s evolving taste – or, as in the case of The Final Problem, to serve his own ends once he decided that working the formula had stopped being fun.

The Holmes Canon, Part 2: A First Season In the Strand

As I’ve previously said, the first two Sherlock Holmes novels are kind of like feature-length pilot episodes for the concept: they may have established the basic framework, but it was really in the short stories that Holmes took shape. After leaving his previous literary agents, Arthur Conan Doyle ended up closely working with The Strand Magazine, in which all of the canonical Holmes short stories would debut, and it was through these short stories that Holmes turned from the protagonist of two reasonably well-received novels to an absolute megastar.

Doyle’s relationship with the Strand would, in fact, be more or less constant; though he’d place occasional material elsewhere, they’d be far and away his most consistent market in the UK. (Other magazines would carry his material overseas.) Though his output might wax and wane a little over his career, he’d be a regular writer for them right up until his death – but the Holmes stories were only one part of that. Initially, there’d be bursts of sustained activity when there’d be a Holmes story in each month’s issue of the Strand for about a year or so; then Doyle would let Holmes and Watson rest and apply himself to other work before returning to them.

For example, the stories later collected in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes appeared in July 1891 to June 1892; they can be seen as forming a first “season” of Holmes stories, to continue the analogy with TV shows, following which Doyle took a break from Holmes, submitted some other material, and then started “season 2” (collected in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes) in December 1892, concluding that in December 1893. Then you had The Hound of the Baskervilles popping up as a sort of “season 3” – though a single novel, it was released over 9 issues from August 1901 to April 1902 on a serial basis, like how the middle seasons of Babylon 5 shifted away from the story-of-the-week format to tell a more or less continuous tale – and then the stories collected in The Return of Sherlock Holmes emerged in October 1903 to December 1904, forming a more traditional “season 4”. After that, the “TV season” analogy breaks down a bit, Doyle putting out Holmes material in little dribs and drabs here and there, though The Valley of Fear and most of the stories in The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes both represent somewhat more sustained bursts of activity.

For this article, I’m going to cover “season 1” – the stories originally collected in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, which conveniently presents them in the order they were published in. This is readily available from Project Gutenberg if you want an ebook of it; I wanted a hard copy so I got the Wordsworth Editions release which compiles it and Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes in a single volume. This compilation also includes the original Sidney Paget illustrations; their reprint of A Study In Scarlet and The Sign of the Four did not include the illustrations from those stories, but they weren’t by Paget, and it was Paget’s art for Strand which really cemented the look of Holmes in the public imagination. (Indeed, his iconic deerstalker and little cape were Paget contributions.)

The Holmes Canon, Part 1: Mormons & Mutinies

Some characters and stories are so ubiquitous that you pick up on some of them even if you’ve never touched the source material. Victorian literature is particularly prone to this, perhaps in part because it was modern enough in its overall storytelling methods that it has ended up being extensively mined for cinema or television, but is often just stodgy enough in its style that many people just satisfy themselves with watching the adaptations. How many of us saw The Muppets’ Christmas Carol before reading the Dickens original, for instance? Oliver Twist, Treasure Island, and a host of other fiction from the era ends up being more familiar to us through adaptation or influence than through direct experience.

One of my own gaps has been the original Sherlock Holmes stories. I’ve seen tons of adaptations – who hasn’t? – but I’ve never actually tackled Arthur Conan Doyle’s actual texts in any systematic manner. You might question whether, even if I do take the time to read it, it’s worth my while covering them in the blog anyway – after all, what new is there to say about them? It’s a series which has generated realms of criticism and analysis for well over a century.

At the same time, I think there’s value in taking a look at them. After all, precisely because they’re the sort of thing which many have been more exposed to through adaptation than through reading the originals, there’s some value in flagging whether they are actually worth your time or not. Moreover, Holmes as a publishing phenomenon is a fascinating subject, not least because the Sherlock Holmes fandom has a good claim on being the first “modern” fandom. Oh, sure, Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins and others were all publishing phenomena in their day, but they didn’t really have fandoms comparable to modern post-Star Trek fandoms. Holmes absolutely did: before the 19th Century was even done you had fans publicly mourning Holmes’ death at the hands of Moriarty and writing fan fiction, and shortly after Doyle’s death organised societies started forming (among the earliest being New York’s Baker Street Irregulars) for enthusiasts of the stories.

Arguably, a great many subsequent fiction-based fandoms have ended up following the same patterns and having the same arguments and conflicts and facing the same pressures that Holmes fandom has over the years – not because they were specifically mimicing the Holmes fandom, but because they are engaged in a sufficiently similar interaction which the source material which has inspired them that parallel evolution is inevitable.

So for this review series I’ve decided to, as closely as possible, read the Sherlock Holmes canon in more or less the order it was published in, so as to observe its evolution and experience the stories in more or less the same sequence that fans would have experienced it back when it first emerged. If you want to read along with me, then naturally Project Gutenberg is your friend here if you want them as ebooks; I had an urge to get them in hard copy, so I’ve picked up the complete set from Wordsworth Editions. For this first salvo, I’m going to take in the first two novels, written by Doyle before he shifted gear into short story writing.