Failure is at the heart of Sherlock Holmes Chapter One.

The very nature of Sherlock Holmes’ methodology of solving crimes -- what Arthur Conan Doyle refers to as deductive reasoning but is much closer to abductive reasoning -- lends itself to the potential for abject failure empowered by great leaps of logic. While the looming chasms of fallacies that surround Holmes’ abduction aren’t deeply explored in Doyle’s work, they make up the bedrock of Frogware’s detective games.

“Being wrong as Sherlock Holmes is both blasphemous and exciting at the same time,” said Yaroslav Martyniuk, feature designers team lead at developer Frogwares. “It’s actually one of the assumptions that we made when designing the game early on. Our story talks about a young Holmes, a young man that only starts to discover who they are, and what their path in life might be. He’s also a bit of a cocky individual, where his confidence might be a bit overblown compared to his abilities. It’s Sherlock growing into the shoes of the world’s greatest detective. So having him be wrong feels right.”

There are myriad shades of failure in Sherlock Holmes Chapter One. You can simply miss out on some of the clues during the course of your investigation, or you can come to the wrong conclusion after piecing those clued together. You can even leap to incorrect judgments about a person’s behavior.

But failure doesn’t typically end the game, it just changes it.

“You just simply move on and live with your choices—and their consequences,” Martyniuk said.

Crafting a game that allows for these wrong guesses, but provides all of the clues necessary to solve the mystery at hand, can be challenging.

“Well, it is a balancing act,” Martyniuk said. “You can’t make the game too simple, as that pretty much eliminates the feeling of ‘solving’ a case, and you can’t go too far into the other direction either, leaving players frustrated and annoyed. One of the two principles of our game is the idea of creating strong narration that involves an element of mystery and no hand-holding gameplay mechanic. Our story and plot behind the cases, and some of the texts that you come across, all carry some level of uncertainty and ambiguity. We want the player to think and evaluate the evidence on his own and have some doubts in their mind when analyzing them.

Frogwares also works to introduce Holmes’ personality and talents to the mix, translating his ability to solve cases, deduce, and observe into investigation mechanics.

“Those mechanics form the core gameplay, allowing the player to gather and interpret the evidence, ‘connect the dots,’, make his own deductions and decide the next step of the investigation,” Martyniuk said. “This is how the story, the narrative, fits with the gameplay mechanics. And having a perfect balance between those two, getting that sweet spot, well, it’s about testing, testing, more testing, revising, gathering feedback, and more testing.”

Among the tools at your disposal in Sherlock Holmes Chapter One is the detective’s famed Mind Palace, a method of loci or mnemonic device devised in ancient Rome that ties memories to locations in a physical or imagined place. In the game, the purpose of the Mind Palace is to give players a visual tool to interpret the events of the past and form a personal attitude towards it. That, in turn, can help the player decide who is guilty and what to do about it. The concept also leaves room for mistakes.

“Some deductions can be interpreted differently, leading to different conclusions,” Martyniuk said.

Other detective mechanics in Sherlock Holmes Chapter One include gathering clues, hunting for secret places, talking to suspects, wearing disguises, and even engaging in occasional combat.

“Now, keep in mind that you are not a superhero, and you’re certainly not a bullet sponge,” Martyniuk said. “You are more of a glass cannon, and the combat is close to Sherlock’s ethos. It’s not about leaving a pile of dead bodies behind you (which you can do, but that can impact the relationship that you have with childhood friend Jon), but more about disarming your enemies and using the environment around you to your advantage. It’s deductive thinking, in a combat situation.”

The tools at your disposal in the latest Sherlock game were developed by Frogwares over nearly 20 years, as the studio created and evolved the Sherlock Holmes games for which they’ve become so known.

“Back in our original Sherlock Holmes games, our gameplay revolved around the classic point-and-click mechanic,” Martyniuk said. “We had to adapt the ‘puzzles’ to the tech that we had at a time. But as the technology evolved and PCs and consoles became more powerful, our games became more elaborate too. Thanks to 3D tech, we were able to introduce puzzles that could use the three dimensions. You could take objects and turn them around to reveal further clues, walk around and investigate a crime scene from more angles, and with the introduction of the open world, we can make the location that you’re investigating bigger too. The scene is no longer restricted to just one room, with people outside of the location being potential witnesses, and perhaps you can even follow tracks to see where suspects ran away. It has become more free-roam and free-range.

Freedom is the key to any successful interactive murder mystery.

You can, when you read a good mystery novel or watch a TV show or movie, work to solve the puzzle before its answer is unveiled. But it’s still a passive experience. With rare exceptions, all of the clues are presented to you, laid out for everyone to absorb. 

Video games, though, have the ability to create not just a mystery, but a space in which a player must hunt for clues and assign them value. It’s the ability interactive fiction has to transform a passive observer into an active participant that gives mystery games like Sherlock Holmes Chapter One such power.

“You are the central character (most of the time),” Martyniuk said. “And giving a person, the player, a feeling of agency and self-accomplishment is what makes this genre of gaming so satisfying. It is what makes you feel smart, and feel like a detective. Let the game awaken your intuition. And if you add a layer of moral grey area, and an ability to be both right and wrong in your deductions, well, you then create these water-cooler moments where people can talk among themselves on how they solved the cases and why they chose the options that they’ve chosen.

“That can be a bit of a special feeling. Being able to see one case, one investigation, but from the perspective of multiple people. Seeing their train of thought, their moral choices, and decisions, that’s really cool for a lack of a better word. It’s like getting to know someone a bit more intimately through gaming.”