New Sherlock Holmes: Crimes & Punishments trailer shows PS3, PS4 gameplay

Hi PlayStation Blog! This is Olga from Frogwares, and I’m here to tell you about our latest game, Sherlock Holmes: Crimes & Punishments.
We’ve been developing Sherlock Holmes games for over a decade now, and the recent reinventions of Sherlock Holmes in the new movies, BBC and CBS series have put a new spin on the character and the world he lives in.
Sherlock Holmes: Crimes & Punishments is a detective game; it needs you to think. The game focuses heavily on investigation, and with an emphasis on narration too. There is a lot of exploration and clue collecting, speaking to witnesses and suspects, and I guess that the most important aspect is bringing all of these together, making your own deductions and bringing the culprits to justice … or setting them free.

With this new Sherlock Holmes game, we really wanted to involve the player to a degree that they’ve never experienced before, both emotionally and intellectually. In Crimes & Punishments, your brain will be, once more, put to the test. This time we’re offering six different cases, with each one not having a single conclusion, but up to six, with the knowledge that each of them could incriminate a different suspect!
Focused on sleuthing, Crimes & Punishments features brand new gameplay mechanics which are vital for your investigation. While interrogating testimonies or suspects, you’ll now be able to observe and examine their general look and attitude in order to unlock the mind of the person you’re speaking with, unveiling new clues.
Your innate deduction skills will also allow you to react to a piece of information divulged by the person to whom you are talking. You then have several seconds to link it to another clue you picked up earlier and to then deduce a further key element from it which another investigator would have overlooked!
The trailer below perfectly sums up this point and shows you how deep this feature can be:

For the first time in the Sherlock Holmes series, the famous sleuth can get it wrong and send innocents to jail. In order to help you find the right criminal, we’ve worked hard on a brand new deduction board, also illustrated in the trailer.
We really wanted the player to feel like they are the greatest detective of all time and that for, Sherlock’s brain is now yours. Each of your discoveries are stored in his fantastic brain, allowing you to match them together, creating a real network of clues, helping you elucidate crime scenes, find suspects and determine guilt.
Once you’ve named your culprit, you’ll be facing a crucial decision: will you condemn or absolve them? This particular point might turn particularly important as it can impact the future of your investigations. At the end of the case, you’ll be given a detective score, and a moral choice that you’ll be able to compare with your friends and the community!

On top of these brand new features, we’ve also worked hard on the atmosphere and improved the graphics of the game thanks to Unreal Engine. As you may have noticed in the video, we paid a lot of attention to the smallest details to make sure that the player always feels like they are Sherlock Holmes.
In each case you will be offered three to five suspects to choose from, because in Crimes & Punishments, you are Sherlock Holmes and you are the one to decide who the culprit is. But it’s not only about finding the criminal (as well as their motive and how exactly they did what they did) but there is also a moral choice for you to make: absolve or condemn the suspect. The law is free from passion, right? Choose wisely for your decisions will influence lives.
Sherlock Holmes: Crimes & Punishments arrives this spring for both PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4. If you want more info, do not hesitate to visit the official website. Stay tuned and I look forward to showing you more soon!