Voice acting, so important in an adventure game, particularly one with this much spoken dialogue, is mediocre. Many actors sound too wooden or are obviously putting on accents, and minor but noticeable flubs are left in. Individual performances are uneven - Holmes starts out decently, but his voice begins to grate after a while, and his English accent sounds inauthentic – could they have actually hired an American actor to play Sherlock Holmes? Watson is the reverse, starting out sounding about as natural as if he were reading from the phone book, but gradually settling in to a decent performance; he may be the best of the bunch, but it's not as if he has much competition.
When it comes to the game's puzzles and related inventory objects, there are numerous issues, ranging from simply quirky, to downright frustrating. Often finding the hot spot you need to interact with is difficult, whether it's using Holmes' magnifying glass on a shoeprint to locate a piece of evidence about the size of a pinhead, or something far more simple like opening a door or just picking something up. Holmes can carry around an anvil and a food cart, but isn't allowed to pick up more than one lead pipe at a time; some objects can't be collected or combined until just the right moment, leading to more backtracking; and unusual objects like a fake beard are illogically left lying around for you to make use of.
In one extremely frustrating example, Holmes finds a handful of complicated glyphs carved into a table by one of the villains, and hours later, at a different location, must use those glyphs to solve a puzzle – except there's no record of them in your journal or documents. Unless you consult a walkthrough, your only option is to backtrack to where you spotted the glyphs and painstakingly reproduce them by hand, and then return again to the site of the puzzle. Then there's Holmes' somewhat bizarre habit of using a spoon to help him open locks – the utensil is used in several such puzzles, and somehow he even picks a cabinet lock with one, even though moments earlier he just found a set of keys lying on the floor in front of it. Give the man a spork and he'd waltz right in to Fort Knox.
To put the icing on the cake, The Awakened occasionally freezes and locks up, leading to a cold reboot and lost progress. Really, the last thing you want to do is experience portions of this game more than once Simply put, this is not a good game. From the uninteresting story, to the mediocre voice acting, uninspired puzzles, and serious technical issues, there's really nothing to recommend here. The adventure game genre is not what it once was and your choices may be limited; nevertheless, The Awakened is not worth your time.
