Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened features clever, creative loading screens. They start out as simple line drawings of your current location, devoid of color and detail, gradually filling in before your eyes until just before the game loads you're presented with an attractive, fully rendered image.

Sadly, the loading screens are the highlight of the game.

The Awakened is a first person adventure game in which you play as the world's most renowned detective (and occasionally step into the shoes of sidekick Dr. Watson, although there's no difference in gameplay between the two). What starts out as a simple missing person case evolves into a save-the-world situation, as Holmes tries to waylay the schemes of a Cthulhu cult who are trying to awaken their big, bad behemoth from its watery sleep to wreak havoc on the world. Mix Sherlock Holmes with elements of Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos, and the potential exists to create a standout adventure title. That is, if the execution is there – you need a well-written, engaging story, good voice acting, and enjoyable, logical puzzles. This game misses the mark in all of these areas.

The plot is rather humdrum and uninteresting, generally moving along at a snail's pace. There is lots of reading and lots of talking and much of it just doesn't seem important. The Cthulhu elements are actually pretty light – Holmes stumbles across more than his share of mutilated corpses, but there's really only one scene illustrating that something truly creepy and otherworldly is at play here (it's arguably the best scene in the game, which would suggest that playing up the supernatural aspects would have been a wise move).

Otherwise Holmes spends his time taking on very ordinary, uninteresting, decidedly non-alien villains. Characters will appear who are apparently vital to the story – Holmes certainly seems to think so - and yet you aren't even sure who they are because they were introduced only briefly in some snippet of text that you read hours earlier. Sometimes you'll spend half an hour investigating a location and the story will have progressed so incrementally that you'll wonder what the point was. Occasionally, despite reviewing all the evidence, Holmes' conclusions won't even make sense – his assumptions are probably correct (after all, this is Sherlock Holmes we're talking about), it's just that he's done a really poor job of explaining his line of reasoning. That single set of footprints has somehow led Holmes to believe that not one, but two abductors were involved in a kidnapping? Whatever you say dude – now pass the opium.

The story has our intrepid duo traveling to multiple locations around the world, from Holmes' beloved Baker Street, to a Swiss insane asylum, to the swamps of New Orleans, and several more. You can use a general map of the area to jump to several key locations once you discover them, but your current position isn't noted, and some levels are so sprawling that it's easy to get lost (New Orleans, I'm looking at you); even more so in a few of the maze-like interior locations, where you don't have any map to refer to at all. Sometimes just knowing where to go or who you're supposed to talk to is half the battle.

At one point, it's obvious you need to visit a customs house, the location of which you've already learned. But the game won't let you travel there – instead, you eventually realize you need to visit another seemingly unrelated location where you'll talk to a character that then drops the bombshell that you need to go to the damn customs house, and only then are you allowed visiting it.