If game releases are postponed, this is usually justified with additional fine-tuning, maybe also with quarterly figures and lately also often with Corona or delivery bottlenecks. But the email I recently received from the Ukrainian developers at Frogwares shocked and touched me in equal measure.
There is talk of “suicidal drones” hitting near the offices and ongoing “rocket attacks that have been targeting Kyiv since October” and therefore massively hampering the development of Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened. From a distance, it’s hard to imagine how a halfway normal life, let alone game development, can even be possible under such conditions.
Already developing the last gen version of their last game, Sherlock Holmes: Chapter One, coincided with the beginning of the Russian war of aggression once morest Ukraine. A press release informed at the time that production on the Xbox One version had been discontinued; the PS4 version was still supposed to be completed, although no one knew exactly how that would be done under the circumstances. Because all of that suddenly seemed completely irrelevant from the moment the developers started talking regarding the reasons: that their hometown was bombed daily, they regularly sought refuge in bomb shelters, colleagues had gone to war to defend their country or had already done so had fallen.
Game development in times of war
Presumably to bravely demonstrate that no aggressor can get you down, Frogwares announced a new game in May 2022 under the working title Project Palianytsia. “The situation in the team has been largely stabilized and we have become accustomed to working with the war constantly raging in the background,” is the disturbingly sober description of the developers. In fact, development on another, large open-world game had already started a while ago, but they were unable to complete it under the given circumstances. Therefore, the capacities are shifted to a smaller project that is more straightforward and less extensive and therefore easier to produce and for which additional support was obtained via Kickstarter. Frogwares is an independent developer without a major publisher with the right financial support for emergencies.
The new game was finally announced at the end of July 2022: Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened, a remake of their 2006 game, which was to be developed from scratch, with up-to-date graphics and a contemporary implementation, but already largely complete in terms of content and therefore relatively easy to implement. A release date was not given at the time. To be honest, none of us thought we’d be hearing regarding the game once more any time soon, if ever.
Then, in November, Frogwares reported that nationwide missile attacks had severely damaged much of the electricity, water, and internet infrastructure, resulting in “constant power outages, unstable internet, and lack of heating” in their offices and homes “Inconveniences”, as Head of Publishing Sergei Oganesyan puts it in a defiant understatement, has severely hampered development.Between sober information regarding the state of the game and descriptions of one’s own situation, there are always clear words once morest the Russian invaders: One will not bowing to an “incompetent and cowardly army” that appears to “need to starve and freeze civilians. Instead, ways and means have been found to “deal with these obstacles and just move on.”
In a moving video entitled “Game Development in Times of War”, the developers described their current situation and how it determines their everyday life: how the work processes are restructured to adapt them to the circumstances, parts of them are relocated abroad or employees try to leave the country themselves, and finally it also shows colleagues who have joined the national defense and send greetings from the front in uniform.
In this video, the Ukrainian developers of Frogwares describe what it’s like to develop a game in the middle of a war.
The clear message is that the development of Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened will definitely continue and is making good progress despite all the adversities. A first trailer showed impressive gameplay footage in Unreal Engine 4 quality. The release was officially set for spring 2023, but secretly every experienced game editor made an asterisk with the comment “when it’s done” following it. Whether the date will actually be kept or has to be postponed once more can only be speculated at the moment. Still, the game seems to be in an advanced state – less than a year following it was announced out of necessity – that we were able to try out a first playable version.
It almost makes me uncomfortable at this point to move on to a topic that seems completely insignificant compared to what has just been described, possibly even tasteless, because it is dedicated to the banal pleasure, while the people behind it deal with it every day in the midst of it war, they fear for their lives and that of their relatives. It seems downright irreverent to me at this point to talk regarding a video game, stripping it down to categories like fun and excitement, and categorizing it by factors like quality of game design and graphics. Ultimately, however, the Ukrainian developers are all regarding what they are doing at the moment under the greatest challenges and hardships: developing a game for the whole world to experience. And in the end it is easy to get their jobs and their company. That’s why we’re going to look at it with you now.
The Awakened: Sherlock Holmes trifft Cthulhu
Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened is a remake of the 2006 game of the same name, which was an unusual crossover between Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective adventures and HP Lovecraft’s Cthulhu horror. While the remake largely retains the storyline of the original, it is heavily modified and expanded in places while the game itself is being developed from the ground up in modern Unreal Engine 4.
The most obvious change in content concerns the two protagonists Holmes and Watson: They are significantly younger compared to the original, so that The Awakened now functions as a sequel to the last game in the series, Sherlock Holmes: Chapter One, which to a certain extent in the form of a (very successful) prequel shed light on the youth of the still young master detective. This spread the detective adventure for the first time on the playful stage of an open world, while The Awakened, on the other hand, is structured in a much more linear way, mainly for the production reasons described above. However, Holmes and Watson appear once more as young men and accordingly have the same (English) dubbing voices as in the predecessor, and the bond of friendship between the two seems even fresher and less marked by trust than in the later stories.
Their first case together starts out seemingly ordinary with a missing person, but soon leads them to the trail of a mysterious cult that worships the god Cthulhu and is working toward the fulfillment of an ancient prophecy. The investigations eventually lead the two to different locations around the world, blurring the lines between reality and madness.
In the third chapter of the game, which we were able to play for regarding 40 minutes, the trail of a hallucinogenic drug leads you to a mental asylum in the Swiss mountains. The chapter title, “The Mountain of Madness,” even alludes to what is probably the best-known story in Lovecraft’s oeuvre. While Watson introduces himself under a pretext as a visitor to the “Edelweiß” institute, Holmes has disguised himself as an inmate and has gained access there and follows the machinations of the cult in the spooky corridors of the asylum.
It is immediately apparent that the developers are not exaggerating when they say that they would not reuse a single line of code from the original, but rather develop The Awakened from scratch – at most a few graphic objects were taken over from the predecessor Chapter One. Otherwise, The Awakened shines in the same high-resolution quality as this one, in which the facial animations at best can’t quite keep up, as is often the case in such indie productions.
The first gameplay trailer for Sherlock Holmes: The Awakening shows the dark and somber setting that spans multiple countries and continents. It also gives insights into some of the tools and tricks Sherlock has in his arsenal for finding the truth.
But The Awakened is also undergoing numerous changes in terms of gameplay in order to orient itself more closely to its predecessor from 2021 in terms of content and quality. After all, the series has continued to develop significantly in the almost 20 years since the original, especially in the puzzle design, which was quite unusual even then, but sometimes also appeared quite brittle and opaque.
In any case, the rather short excerpt that we were able to play already had all the game mechanics that made Chapter One a playfully varied detective investigation. In the role of the master detective, we search the places in the asylum for clues to the terrible events in order to then link them together in Holmes’ mind palace and draw such conclusions. Only when we have gained certain insights can we speak to other inmates or reconstruct the course of events in a kind of holographic simulation.
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The demo ended on a cliffhanger, offering a first taste of this idiosyncratic crossover’s transition into the horror genre: a manifestly insane inmate with a supposedly demon-possessed, horribly disfigured doll heralds a dimension of madness there, albeit anyone with a little research the history of this almost 20-year-old game can simply be read somewhere, we refrain from further spoilers, since it can be assumed that many people do not yet know the original from back then.
What was striking in our short demo, however, was how noticeably well the connection between the Sherlock Holmes keynote and the Cthulhu myth harmonizes – no wonder, when you consider that the novels have always at least flirted with the horror genre, man think of the Hound of Baskerville or the murders of Jack the Ripper, which regularly shine through between the lines as a source of inspiration. Above all, however, it is the always subliminally present struggle between the power of an ingenious spirit and the illusion of opium intoxication that spans an exciting thematic arc to the interplay of reality and madness, worldly crime and the work of a malicious god, which is what fascinates Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened should fundamentally determine.