Get the Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments - Tech Demo Trailer off WP (32mb)

For the first time ever, Frogwares Studio will abandon their homemade graphics engine. The latest adventures of Sherlock Holmes will be developed on Epic’s Unreal Engine 3, allowing the series to jump far ahead of previous installments in graphical quality. Environments will be more realistic and finely detailed with dynamic lighting and shadows. Choosing this engine also lets the game benefit from many technologies like a powerful animation engine for smooth movement and animation transitions, real-time shaders and a particle system, and advanced post-processing effects.

With Crimes & Punishments, the series will mark a new milestone, as the development studio Frogwares will give up its home-made engine in order to switch to the well-known Unreal Engine 3 from Epic. This choice will first allow the game to benefit from bigger environments that are more gorgeous and more varied, all while offering an incredible level of detail: dynamic lighting, shaders, post-processing effects, animations... the game is an all-around winner, as illustrated in the very first presentation video of the new engine of Sherlock Holmes' latest game, which we're sending you today.

This new engine not only benefits the game's graphics: it also allows the development of new investigation mechanics that the previous engine's limitations did not permit. These new mechanics give the player the feeling that they ARE Sherlock Holmes, and enable them to fully use the incredible talents and gifts known to all fans, such as his skill to guess many details about someone's life simply by glancing at them - or to imagine and reconstruct the course of event by carefully observing all the key details of a crime scene.

Unlike the previous adventures of Sherlock Holmes, in Crimes and Punishments you will not be a mere spectator during the detective’s investigation. It is now your turn to truly become Sherlock Holmes and lead your own investigation-actually, your investigations, as 8 captivating cases await you! Murders, disappearances, spectacular thefts, and other investigations will bring you to the cutting edge of the detective genre and these cases will be the bread and butter of this game, written in the pure tradition of Conan Doyle’s novels. Each case offers real freedom to players, who will have to make important moral choices instead of simply enforcing justice by the book. All decisions have an influence in the game and affect your character’s reputation in addition to having realistic, sometimes unexpected, consequences. You will have to bear the weight of your choices, as Crimes and Punishments offers an exciting system of actions/consequences that forces players to think before acting by giving true depth to every decision they make.

In Crimes and Punishments, players will embody a Sherlock Holmes with a brand new look. Developers at Frogwares have abandoned the classic Sherlock Holmes inspired by the 60s Sherlock movies, replacing him with a more modern character perfectly matching the new artistic ambitions of the title