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Complete disappointment

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 97 / 100
Date: October 11, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I am giving this game two stars - one for the graphics and one for the first half of the game. As already mentioned, the graphics in this game rival those of Syberia I and II. The details are incredible: the fine grain of the wood, individual hairs on the characters' heads or the leaves on a tree branch. In addition the colors were rich and vibrant. I was really encouraged by the graphics and the storyline for the first half of the game: A wealthy Englishman is murdered in front of a hundred witnesses at a party being held for his daughter with whom he has been estranged. In fact, the initial suspect is his daughter. In typical adventure gameplay you, as Sherlock Holmes (and occasionally Watson), wander throughout the deceased's house and other locations collecting and examining clues and interviewing witnesses. While collecting evidence Holmes encounters a number of puzzles.

One puzzle involves placing numbered pieces on board resembling a chessboard so that each column and row of numbers adds up to the same total - very logical and easy (although time consuming) game. Another puzzle involves placing animal statues into "Noah's Ark" in the correct order. This is a more difficult puzzle and requires examining a few clues for the answer. However, two other puzzles (a card game and the combination to a safe) made no sense to me even after consulting a walkthrough. But even that wasn't as bad as the puzzles that occur during the second half of the game.

These are timed puzzles. For the first puzzle Holmes has to get from one location to another without being caught by a guard and a watch dog. One problem with the puzzle is that the characters of Holmes, the dog and the guard are only about the size of a gnat, making them almost impossible to distinguish. Another problem was that I could not figure out where Holmes was supposed end up. The only way I could figure out this puzzle was with a walkthrough along with a whole lot of persistence. It had to have taken me a dozen or more attempts to get Holmes where he needed to go without being detected. I found this so frustrating and it made me so angry that the rest of the game was ruined for me. After all, adventure games are supposed to be fun - not make you want to throw your computer out the window (instead I threw my mouse across the room). But wait - once you get Holmes to his destination successfully, and he is done there, there's a similar timed puzzle to get him to a second location without detection.

Then, just as you think (and hope) that this was the last of the timed puzzles, you're stuck with another one. In this puzzle, Holmes goes through a maze set in a forest and then needs to retrace his steps to fetch a pail of water to put out a fire. This wouldn't have been too bad except that Holmes can be very difficult to manipulate at times. Theoretically, the player should just half to click on an icon (a set of footprints) to get Holmes to move. Unfortunately, Holmes doesn't always move when this icon is clicked or the icon doesn't appear at all (or is difficult to locate - a couple of times it is located on Holmes's body). This makes moving Holmes quickly through a maze very frustrating. It took me another dozen or more attempts to accomplish this task (this time I only screamed obscentities at my computer). Even though I was mad, frustrated and disappointed I had to finish the game to find out who the killers are (a few more bodies pile up during the game). Once all the clues are gathered it is time for Holmes to reveal the killers. But instead of a nice tight conclusion Holmes rambles on for at least fifteen minutes - the answer was so convoluted and contrived that I lost interest - even taking a bathroom break, only to come back to find Holmes still going on and on and on.

This is a game I was really looking forward to. The first half of the game was very promising but then it took a dramatic turn for the worse - I cannot recommend it.

Not worth the bother

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 65 / 73
Date: October 15, 2004
Author: Amazon User

First a caution: Read the technical specs before you buy! This game requires a specific chip set and WILL NOT RUN without it, a surprisingly advanced requirement for such a low-level game. Check out the technical requirements before you buy!

That being said, don't bother to upgrade your machine to play this game -- it's not really worth it. Gameplay consists of pixel-hunting, running through a set list of questions, and random combinations of inventory items. The plot, such as it is, is confusing and illogical, though the acting is decent. Each chapter ends with a mandatory quiz that's annoyingly difficult; it mainly provides a reason to give up and go play something else.

Would like to see more by these writers, with perhaps a smoother interface and a better plot.

Too convoluted to be entertaining

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 17 / 17
Date: May 15, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Sherlock Holmes and his Boswell, Watson, have been invited to a reception a noted industrialist, Melvyn Bromsby, is giving for his daughter's 18th birthday. Although Holmes hates social engagements of this type, they deicde to stop in on the way to the opera. And a good thing, too! Just as Bromsby starts his speech, a shot rings out and he falls dead. The smoke clears from the doorway from which the shot seems to have come, revealing his daughter! It seems obvious she murdered her father. But has she? Only Sherlock Holmes can put together the evidence and reveal the mystery.

There are three ways of looking at _Secret of the Silver Earring_: as a Sherlock Holmes pastiche, as an adventure game and as a mystery. The first of these is the easiest to deal with: for the most part SotSE is an excellent homage to the world's first consulting detective. The character realizations are pretty good and the dialog is very authentic. The backgrounds--particularly the sitting room at Baker Street--are immediately recognisable. Only a few details detract from the overall impression: Holmes' eyes are the wrong colour, for example.

When it comes to the story, however, SotSE doesn't measure up. There are far too many characters and far too many divergent lines of thought for a real Sherlockian feel. Holmes' best cases really are, when you possess the relevant information, "absurdly simple." This one really isn't. And that gets in the way of its success, both as a mystery and as a game.

For fans of 3rd person adventures with oodles of characters and conversations, SotSE is not without interest. In fact, it starts out quite well, as you go from place to place gathering your evidence. Gameplay is relatively straightforward, with a smart cursor giving you travel, conversation and manipulation options. The one problem is that Holmes (or Watson, who you occasionally play) doesn't always readily respond to your commands. This becomes an issue in the latter portions of the game. Initially, the puzzles are engaging: neither too complex nor too simple, with a balance of inventory and mechanical. Two timed puzzles in the last third of the game, however, are very nearly game stoppers. One, where you must sneak into a building without being caught, is virtually impossible to complete without recourse to a walkthrough. The other, where you must navigate a maze rapidly, would have been less frustrating without the response issue previously mentioned. Because of it I had to repeat the task numerous times and barely succeeded in the end. This puzzle is all the more frustrating because it turns out to have been useless: though ostensibly you're trying to save evidence by quenching a fire before valuable papers burn, when you finally succeed the burnt papers have no value.

At the end of each day you must complete a quiz about the evidence you've gathered in order to proceed. The quizzes themselves are not difficult, although the answers to one or two questions are not crystal clear. But they did not seem to lead you anywhere. Rather than elucidate the mystery, the evidence just becomes more and more cumbersome. I expected, by the end of the game, to have some idea what was going on. And I did manage to peg the main murderer, but it was more by intuition than deduction.

As a mystery, SotSE is not well put together. The game is set up in such a way that I think it would be virtually impossible to come up with the entire solution. In the first place, there are so many characters that you just can't keep track of them, and there is no device within the game to let you do so. A body turns up and seems to have no connection to anything else until the end, when the victim turns out to have been someone you spoke 3 words to on the first day, whose name was never given. Someone turns out to have been someone else, but there's no way to determine this or even any clue that you should. The case hinges on the murderer's having been in a certain country at a certain time, but you never actually get to see the evidence that proves he was there. In a true Holmes story, the detective would at least partially explain things as you went along, or at least make pointed comments. There is some attempt to do this here, but most of the comments are so cryptic as to be no help or so trivial as to be pointless. Or the information you get from them is never entered into evidence at all.

In the end, the solution is expounded in a 15-minute movie that is incredibly hard to follow and just plain boring. I would have liked this game better if you had been able to marshall your facts and come up with a few answers at the end of each day. As it was, there were so many bodies and so much to keep track of that by the end I didn't even care.

I think I got through this game in about 20 hours, taking breaks for a week at a time while I steeled myself to complete the timed puzzles. If you want to play Silver Earring, thnking of it as a piece of interactive fiction rather than a game might help. I think completing a game should leave a person with a feeling of accomplishment, but this one just had me wondering why I bothered.

Pros and Cons Like Most Stuff

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 16 / 17
Date: September 02, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I could type a school report on this thing, but I'll put it down plain and simple (as much as possible):

Pros: Loved the graphics! British accents pretty accurate and genuine. Not quite historically correct. This was supposed to occur during the 1890's, yet Miss Lavinia Bromsby looks far from it. Her dress lacks the leg-of-mutton sleeves and has a shockingly unmodest neckline; something one would never see on a "mature damsel," as the Sherlock Holmes Society of London puts it. Her hair is not put up, but we can make the excuse for her that she was returning to England from Somewhere I Forgot. ;) The story was ok, but didn't have Doyle's "magic touch." The clues were challenging to find, which I think is good and bad.

Cons: Well, I got this from the library and would recomend you to do the same if your library has this. What I absolutely HATED, was that once in a while, due to no fault of my own, the game FROZE! A few times I got it to start again by waiting until Christmas, but about 3 times I had to reboot. Be extrememly careful when playing, is my advice. Don't over click or get carried away. Another thing that was annoying was that They wouldn't let you out of the mansion until you found all the clues. I found about 20 clues but still wasn't allowed out the door. I must have examined each room 10 times; every square inch, mind! But to no avail. Poor Holmes must have gotten a sore throat from all the times he said, "It is not time to join Watson. I have not examined everything yet."

Thankfully, They let you save games.

Only play if you are a true Sherlockian; there is no other way you can possibly enjoy it.

Totally frustrating

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 19 / 22
Date: June 11, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I looked forward to this game, as I enjoy Sherlock Holmes. There was a long, boring movie at the beginning, which set up the gameplay, but I sat through it because I thought, "Ok, when the game actually starts, this may be fun because the graphics are pretty good." WRONG.

I was so bored trying to move Holmes (or Watson) around the room and down hallways, or over to talk to someone (extremely cumbersome and awkward movements) that I thought I would go nuts. Well, what do you know, I DID go nuts because it seemed like after you finally got them to walk somewhere (all the while doing military 90 degree turns, etc.) all you could do was talk (and talk and talk) to people, without being able to properly explore a room and look for "clues". He's quite a chatty guy. Once in awhile you could pick up an item, but not often enough. And, when you could, he would say, something dumb like "Why, what is this??". After about the fourth time he said that I wanted to bonk him on the head.

I was so frustrated by the awkward movement of the characters, and the boring conversations, that I QUIT THE GAME after 45 minutes. I couldn't stand it anymore...and, I rarely quit games.

Oh, yes, I did get a giggle watching Holmes "open" a door by using his hand to twist the wallpaper on the wall, instead of the doorknob. Very unrealistic movements for those type of things.

If I could have rated this a zero, I would have. Don't buy the game, unless you feel you have to have it...and if you do, get it for fifty cents at a garage sale or something.

I was Sherlock Holmes!!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 14 / 16
Date: October 17, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I'm a girl, I just finish the game and I recommend it really! It's so great to play a story so breathtaking: sets, characters, music, voices and plot (oh man what a story!) are perfect. I don't understand how some could have the feeling of poverty because all is so structured, logic, profound, surprising and fun!
Let me develop my point of view:
- each detail has a reason to exist because it has its importance for the investigation
- the atmosphere of the manor, the forest, the theatre or the cemetery for example suits exactly to the situation thanks to the gorgeous graphics, sounds and musics
- every character has someone to reproach for something and you have a lot of suspects so it's a real investigation
- the puzzles are various and funny; yes, you have to save like in every good adventure games! It's not so easy, but the interest is always keeping.
- The cinematic are gorgeous (I loved the dominos one and the Chinese pursuit) and the outcome (20 fine min!) is so inspired!
- Step by step, thanks to the quiz, I guessed the suspects to eliminate; I loved also the documents and the dialogs so attractive.

Well I felt like in a real Sherlock Holmes story with mystery and new developments. I hope there will be other adventure games like that: not "only" beautiful, but intelligent: brilliant.

I wanted more than pretty pictures

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 12 / 13
Date: August 31, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Hello? Adventure-game software developers? GRAPHICS ARE NOT ENOUGH. Yes, the pictures are lovely, but I'd rather have characters that actually moved where and when I wanted them to than closeup shots of servants' facial blemishes.

As mentioned by others, the dialogue and story are so clumsy and tedious that I stopped caring who did or said what, when, where, how, or why about halfway through the game. It just wasn't worth the mental RAM to keep it straight. There were many times I found myself whining "Oh, would you just shut UP already!" at the characters. I hit the space bar to make them stop babbling, but you still have to process every conversation in order to progress. I usually used these boring bits to get a snack or take a bathroom break, then just read the dialogue as recorded in the notebook.

What really killed the game for me, however, were the timed tests. The #1 reason I play ONLY adventure games is because I enjoy being able to explore, experiment, investigate, and solve at my leisure. I don't want aliens, goblins, or goons jumping out trying to kill me, and I DON'T WANT TIMED TESTS. I want to challenge my mind, not my touchpad-tapping finger. Quick-clicking is NOT a life skill or talent I need or desire to perfect, so the timed tests are simply annoying and insulting. Having to repeat the same interminable steps again and again and again and AGAIN simply because you've got five seconds left and Holmes won't move his butt no matter where or how much you click on the path he has to travel is not my idea of fun. I finally gave up and downloaded a cheat save for the forest fire test because Holmes always got stuck on his return trip, refusing to move despite the white footprint icon. Since when is that fun?

I don't recommend this game. Unless, of course, you simply adore timed tests that don't work, dialogue that doesn't end, stories that don't matter, and closeups of facial blemishes.

the best Sherlock Holmes game ever.

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 8 / 8
Date: October 17, 2004
Author: Amazon User

this game is the best Sherlock Holmes game ever. the story is fantastic, complex and purely in ACD style. the graphics are wonderful and I felt like I was in England at the end of the 19th century. the music is superb. the dialogs are perfect, funny and ironic just like in the books.
the gameplay is the best I have seen for a long time, you really feel like being Sherlock Hommes, it might be too intellectual for some players, but for one who got brains you won't be disapointed.

Totally Enjoyable

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 8 / 8
Date: December 30, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I enjoyed this beautiful game. The graphics are a delight, the story mysterious until Sherlock's final explanation. Do not be dismayed by having to avoid a watchman and dog in one part and the timed puzzle later on. I used a walkthrough to help with these sequences and after a few tries, succeeded with a lot less frustration than I expected. All games have some flaws that you would like to improve on. But this game is just so beautiful with appropriate music and lots of characters and locations. I thoroughly enjoyed and will probably play again some day.

Pretty to look at ... deadly dull to play

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 7 / 8
Date: February 13, 2006
Author: Amazon User

This game's documentation boasts that it has more than 3 hours of dialog. Actually, it seemed like 30. There were times when that's all you do: listen to people talk talk talk, and that's before you come to the VERY lengthy end "movie" (more about that later).

During the game, in which you are usually Sherlock Holmes and occasionally Dr. Watson, you search several locations for clues about a murder (and ultimately, several murders). This entails "painting the wallpaper" with your cursor, searching for hotspots that lead to things as minute as hairs and a feather. At times you (literally) need a magnifying glass to find them. It also includes reams of documents and transcripts of conversations, all of which are recorded in your notebook for future reference.

There are only three or four real "puzzles" in the game -- ranging from ludicrously simple (the box at the end of the game) to impossibly difficult (the safe 'combination,' which even most walkthrough authors say is nearly impossible to figure out).

To make things easier (or duller, depending on your point of view) the game is extremely linear. You can't leave a location unless you have found all the clues for that segment. Once you find the last clue, you are normally zapped to another scene.

Even the "crime laboratory" scenes at 221b Baker street do nothing to add interest to the game. You click on an item in your inventory and Holmes tells you what to do with it ("Hmmmm ... I wonder what heat will do to this item?")

The second worst feature of the game (I'll get the to worst feature in a minute) are the periodic "quizzes" that take place at the end of each "day" of investigation. You are forced to answer questions and even provide the "evidence" to justify your answer. If you're wrong, you have to just keep at it until you get them all right. Is this a game or a classroom?

To its credit, some the graphics are gorgeous, with incredible color and detail. Spend time really looking at the interior of Holmes' Baker street apartment, or even the cobblestone street. In addition, for the most part, the voice overs are good, with a real feel for the speech patterns of the old Holme's movies.

Yet, the navigation is awful. You're supposed to be able to click when you see the "footprints" icon, but half the time you have to click all over the screen to get Sherlock to move. To complicate matters, the perspective keeps shifting so you hardly know if you're coming or going! And when was the last time you had to work your way through a maze? Wasn't it back in the Zork I days?

The absolute worst feature, though, is the extended cutscene at the end, with Sherlock reviewing the entire case and explaining how everyone was killed, by whom, etc. Granted, I had guessed early on that it was ... oops, can't tell you! ... but the convoluted explanation at the end brought in facts that we never had throughout the game. If I wanted to watch a movie, I'd have rented a DVD rather than buy this game.

All in all, despite the few good features that kept me going until the end, I can't recommend this for anyone who wants more than a bit of eye candy for graphics design.

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