The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes 2 - The Case of the Rose Tattoo

Having already played the first episode of this game, I was a little more cautious this time with my expectations, and rightly so, I must say. The key characteristics haven't really changed too much, which wouldn't necessarily be bad but in this case, there was a most definite room for improvement.

Story

It all starts out with a harmless invitation sent to Sherlock by his brother, Mycroft. He invites Holmes and Dr. Watson for a chat at his favorite club. Unfortunately (and even more so for Mycroft) the club is blown to bits by a huge explosion just before Sherlock could attend to his brother's invitation. The police deem the matter to be the fault of a gas leak, which is "the price we have to pay for the use of modern technology" in their opinion. Needless to say, Holmes doesn't share their views. He discovers a secret conspiracy with roots running as deep as the British government and the Prussian Kaiser. Driven by revenge, he goes after the criminals, but this time the case is different. This time it's personal.

Opinion

This game is mysteriously like its predecessor and bears the same mistakes that were made in the first episode. The only thing I can honestly say has improved is the quality of the graphics, which you can see for yourselves on the screenshots.

There is one thing about the graphics which I don't consider an improvement and that's the use of digitized characters. The images of actors playing their part are scanned in and animated which is something I usually don't like in adventure games (at least not in those which don't use FMV sequences as well). To be fair though, it would be very hard to imagine what kind of character graphics would have fit these surroundings better.

The sound score of the game hasn't changed too much. MIDI music accompanies most of the locations, but unfortunately the tunes are not terribly well composed. They don't help getting you immersed in the story at all and some of them even manage to be a bit irritating.

Just like in the Case of the Serrated Scalpel, the story is more or less linear and you can only choose to do a couple of things in a different order than it was intended. One change I've noticed in gameplay is that the designers have apparently given up the concept of composing puzzles for the game and chose to stimulate the players' powers of observation rather than their brain. Our job is basically to look at and examine every single object available at a location (including the characters!) and then speak to the person or persons if possible. My strategy was to go into a place, look at everything and exhaust all possibilities (like move, examine, etc.) before speaking to the actual character in the room. After doing that, speak to Doctor Watson and speak to the other person again. That's pretty much enough to go through the game without any trouble - and any excitement, I might add.

The actual story is - or would be - quite interesting, although not even remotely gripping. Unfortunately, the aforementioned problems don't add too much to the enjoyment of the game. I also found it hard to take on the role of Sherlock Holmes, because the character didn't seem to fit the image associated with him at all. In addition to that, I found that some of the other actors overplayed their part a little which made a couple of situations quite ridiculous.

All in all, I wouldn't say this was a bad game, in fact, I'd probably even risk calling it good and I admit, I enjoyed playing it (after getting used to its flaws) but it's nowhere near my top 10 list.