Crimes and Punishments will be doled out on September 30th

I'm starting to think I might be the only one intrigued by Frogwares' latest Sherlock Holmes game, which drops the Great Detective in an Unreal-powered old-timey world filled with suspicious suspects, evidential evidence, and a bucket-load of stuff for Holmes to deduce with the aid of his thinking deerstalker and keen, opium-riddled eyes. Crimes and Punishments' last trailer was a big'un , showing most of a case save for some spoilery deductions and the revelation of whodunit, but this latest one is exceptionally brief. That's because it's there to contain one salient piece of information: the game's release date. I'm going to pretend you didn't read it in the headline up there and secrete it, like an evil genius, after the break.

September 30th. Crimes and Punishments is releasing September 30th. While you're here, here are three reasons why I'm quite looking forward to it, despite Frogwares' previous games keeping my expectations fairly grounded:

  1. You can dress Holmes up in a variety of disguises
  2. There's a neat deduction mechanic that will allow you to freeze time and cross-examine suspects for clues to their behaviour and pasts
  3. To some degree, you can decide how to act upon the information you uncover throughout the game, leading to one of nine different outcomes to each case. Holmes didn't exactly trust the police, remember

You've probably all seen Creepy Watson by now, but in the course of my regular Holmes rummaging I uncovered this official follow-up:

Ta, Blue's News .

Tom Sykes

Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.