Review by: Brandon "Elementary" Cackowski-Schnell

It's hard not to draw similarities between Sherlock Holmes and Professor Hershel Layton. Both are avid mystery solvers, both are British and both have a penchant for hats and sidekicks. Given this, it was just a matter of time before someone tried to replicate the successful formula of the Professor Layton series, only with Sherlock Holmes at the helm which is exactly what's going on with Sherlock Holmes and the Mystery of Osbourne House. Unfortunately, for fans of both Sherlock Holmes and puzzle games, there's nothing here to appeal to either group proving that you can't be successful simply by copying success.

For a game called "The Mystery of Osbourne House", the titular house doesn't show up until very late in the game with the marjority of the game's story revolving around uncovering a plot to seize power in Britain by blowing up the Queen. During your investigations the game follows the Professor Layton formula practically note for note. You travel to new locations, tap on the screen to uncover puzzles, solve them, get assigned a point value based on how many hints you purchased and then move onto the next puzzle. Score enough points and more puzzles are unlocked at the end of the game. Along the way some pointless adventure game inventory busywork pops up to make you feel like you're playing an adventure game however it's so obvious what has to be combined in order to progress that it feels both lazy and insulting.

Who cares about inventory though, this is a puzzle game right? As long as the puzzles are aces, it's all good. Well, they're not good—not even partially good. In many cases, simply tapping the touch screen repeatedly is enough to solve a puzzle, a solution you'll come to often as the game doesn't give you any instructions as to what the puzzle expects from you. You can buy hints from your stash of puzzle points, or whatever they're called, which is fine if you know what you're supposed to be doing but just can't suss out a solution, however the player shouldn't be charged to find out how the puzzle works in the first place. Luckily you can always save your game, buy a hint to see how the puzzle works and then reload your game, but you shouldn't have to. The game has a sliding block puzzle, something that every puzzle game known to man has, but the blocks only move in certain directions. Honestly! Who does that?

Some puzzles barely register as puzzles, involving slapping together bits of your inventory until you come up with whatever you need for the task at hand like replicating a dog's bark or getting a cannon working or firing said cannon at a cave wall as the cannon swings wildly back and forth. I'm all for having puzzles of varying difficulty levels but sometimes the swing between "only random tapping can solve this" to "so easy a toddler can figure it out" is both jarring and unpleasant.

Eventually, after about three and a half hours your puzzle journey will be over and the Queen will be safe. If you didn't spend too much money on learning how the puzzles worked, more puzzles will be unlocked for you to wildly tap on. Once those puzzles are finished then that's all she wrote as, like in the Layton series, the game has zero replay value for the puzzles you've already completed. Unlike the Layton series though, there are no new puzzles to download, or a great story with awesome characters for you to reflect on once the game is over.

There's nothing wrong with taking a game's successful formula and trying to replicate that success in your own game. Games are a cannibalistic media with new titles taking bits and pieces of successful franchises all of the time, however if you're going to make your game in such a way that it draws direct comparisons to another game, you better make sure yours is as good as the game you drew from, or, at the very least, pretty good. Sherlock Holmes and the Mystery of Osbourne House is neither pretty good nor as good as any of the games in the Professor Layton series that it's trying to emulate. Why you'd play this game, when you could play any of the games it draws inspiration from is the real mystery.