With 'The Hobbit' a great success (despite the numerous bugs - more on those later!), Philip Mitchell and his team could have done the obvious and moved straight onto 'Lord of the Rings' (which they also had the license for). However, instead they chose to leave Middle Earth behind for the moment and concentrate on another literary legend instead.

After 15 months of hard work they revealed 'Sherlock', based on the exploits of Sherlock Holmes. The game appeared in late 1984 for the 48k Spectrum and the Commodore 64 and again cost £14.95. Throughout the development of 'Sherlock' it was not known if graphics would be included. Memory was tight but in the end a few pictures made it in, although less in volume (and some might say quality) they served their purpose. The plot wasn't based on any one Sherlock Holmes novel, but rather it tried to emulate the spirit and flavour of the novels with a new case for the infamous detective designed specifically for the game by Philip Mitchell.

'Sherlock' used a refined but superficially similar system to 'The Hobbit'. The INGLISH parser remained intact, although the commands you could give to the other characters (Lestrade, Watson etc...) became more complex. The real time element raised its annoying head again. Time played an important part in solving the game. To emphasise the point, a digital clock display appeared on screen at all times. As with many who dunnit style games since (Mag Scrolls 'Corruption' comes to mind), you had to be in a certain place at a certain time if you were to have any chance of solving the case.

The game itself was spread over a couple of days and involved an amount of travelling in handsome black cabs and using the railway time table that came in the box to catch trains to and from such exotic locations as Leatherhead. (I can remember someone pointing out that in reality you can't actually get a train to Leatherhead from Kings Cross Station as you can in the game, not even back in Victorian times). The plot involved murder and the discovery of a body in peaceful Leatherhead. As the plot progressed things become more involved until by the end the case concerned foreign spies and a threat against the whole of the United Kingdom.

As Sherlock Holmes, the player had to collect evidence and present it to Lestrade. If all went well the game progressed nicely. If not, you could easily get stuck at one point and miss the next set of vital clues as a result. Timing was crucial. (One interesting trivia item was that the extensive vocabulary understood by the INGLISH parser didn't understand the surname "Holmes"!)

I got the impression that 'Sherlock' didn't go down as well with the game buying public (or the magazines of the time) as it's predecessor had. I found it a frustrating game at times. Quite often you could do exactly what you were supposed to do to uncover a clue yet it would not work. Later on I learnt that if you did certain actions earlier in the game (like sitting in Watsons armchair in the initial location whilst he was still in it instead of sitting in your own) then important parts of the plot would fail to trigger off later on, even though the two were completely unrelated as far as the plot was concerned. This kind of bug was unfortunately common place.
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