Right from the get-go this game had a tall bar to clear, at least as far as I was concerned. One of my favorite graphic adventure games of all time is Electronic Arts' Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes: The Case of the Rose Tattoo. That title, in addition to being a great game, accomplished the amazing feat of making me feel like I really was Sherlock Holmes hot on a case.

Sherlock Holmes Nemesis clearly is striving to match Electronic Arts' standard from its opening moments.  The intro's 3D tour of the environs of Baker Street is perhaps even a direct homage to the earlier game, which has a similar opening in 2D.  And, indeed, Nemesis is an ambitious effort.  This is a long, complex game, with lush 3D graphics, a greatest-classical-hits soundtrack and not one but two stars.  Apparently, Monsieur Lupin is himself a famous fictitious character, a gentleman cat burglar.  I'd never heard of him, but a quick perusal of the web proves that he does exist, at least in literature, penned by Maurice Leblanc.  I even found a couple of the books available as e-texts (Arsene Lupin and The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsene Lupin).  A quick scanning of these tomes did not lure me in deeper, but we're not concerned with M. Lupin's past literary credentials here.  We want to know how he performs in this game.

Here's the skinny: The young rascally, imperturbably imputent M. Lupin has taken it upon himself to avenge the entire French Republic against the English Empire.  He flings the gauntlet at Sherlock Holmes' feet in the form of a letter promising to steal five of England's (actually, London's) greatest treasures in as many nights.  All he will do is provide riddles as clues to his intended targets.  It's up to Holmes and Watson to catch him, if they can.  The game's afoot!

But first I have a technological confession to make.  This game made me sick.  Physically, that is.  I get sick as a dog playing 3D first person games if there's too much obligatory swinging about.  Which of course there always is.  I simply cannot play 3D first person shooters because of this.  The giant thingamajig is bearing down on me and I have to fire or flee, but what I really feel like doing is retching and lying down with a cold compress on my head.  Every video game nowadays comes with that disclaimer about epilepsy, but nobody has any sympathy for those of us suffering from motion sickness.  Luckily for me, I don't like first-person-shooters, 3D or otherwise.  Heretofore in the few 3D first person adventure games I have played, I've been able to keep my condition under control by just not jerking about suddenly.  Take it slow.  It's an adventure game.  No rush.

So what's the very first thing you have to do in Nemesis?  You have to go to a certain nearby shop to get a certain inventory item.  Okay.  Where's the map?  Ha!  You have to go the entire way on foot, down the hall, down the stairs, up the street, the whole nine yards.  It took five minutes!  I nearly didn't make it.  Then I had to navigate my way back. Up the stairs.  Back up the corridor.  Come on!  This is fun?

For a while there, matters only got worse, navigationally.  In compensation, however, the game got much better.  Even the in-game map got better.  I still got sick a lot of the time, but I was happier doing it.  I just wish they'd given me the option to play in third person, as some 3D games let you do.

One more gripe in this vein before I move on to the good stuff.  It's something I'm gonna call the Mr. Magoo Effect.  At one point in Nemesis a character jokes to Sherlock that he must need his famous magnifying glass because he's nearsighted.  Well, you may be nearsighted too at the end of this game after hunting down all the hotspots.  Searching for hotspots in a 2D game simply involves sweeping your mouse pointer around the screen.  In a 3D game, though, you have to travel around to visit every digital nook and cranny.  And in Nemesis the hotspots are so unforgiving it requires practically climbing atop every object.  At times, you feel like you're playing bumper cars with the scenery.  Riding in a bumper car is fun. Being the bumper car isn't.  There's even a feature in this game where your character can squat down.  So, of course, to be thorough, you end up doing more squatting than a Major League baseball catcher.

Having to zoom up close in a 3D game is particularly excruciating for someone like me, but I would guess even a normal person would get fed up with having to literally press his or her nose up against every single item in the game just to make sure it's not a hotspot.  I suppose the game designers would say that this is not true, that all the active objects in the game can be clicked from arm's length.  Hmmm.  Maybe, but it doesn't matter.  Because when you're frantically searching for that one missing item or necessary hotspot, you as a player can't assume that arm's length has been good enough.  The hotspots in this game are narrow enough that you feel obliged to jam your face up against everything, just in case.  I know the designers probably did this to make the game a little more challenging, but it's not a good tradeoff.  Make the puzzles harder, not the navigation.

So what's good about the game?  Well, a number of things.  First, the game won me over because it became clear that the developers really put a lot of effort into making it.  This is no fly-by-night, get it on the shelves before the reviews trash it kind of game.  A lot of time and effort and talent was put into pretty much every aspect, the graphics, the plot, the writing, the puzzles.  As I say, this is an ambitious game.  If there were an Oscar for videogames, this would be one of the ones that releases on Christmas weekend, a solid contender.

I mentioned that there are two stars.  Though you play as either Sherlock or Watson, with one rather oddball instance playing the role of Inspector Lestrade (how'd that get in there?), Lupin is presented as on an equal footing with Sherlock.  This makes me wonder if this game isn't being marketed in France as an Arsene Lupin game, wherein our hero takes on this funny English fellow named Sherlock Holmes. (In fact, the European title of the game is Sherlock Holmes versus Arsene Lupin; because, I suppose, people in Europe actually know who Arsene Lupin is.)

The plot is not only well, uh, plotted, but entertaining.  Maybe I've just played too many doomsday scenario games lately, but the light, frothy tone of this game really won me over.  Moreover, Nemesis truly is a battle of wits.  Not only between the two protagonists, but between you and the game.  After a few warm-up puzzles, the investigation gets intense.  The game has an admirably wide array of puzzle types, which itself adds to the experience, but the main obstacle is tackling M. Lupin's many riddles.  Each riddle Sherlock finds usually leads to another.  The cat-and-mouse aspect gets frantic at times.  You begin to think you're never going to get through the current run of challenges.  Though some of the individual riddles are taxing in themselves, it's the accumulation of them that really tests you.  There are also some "fixed screen" logic puzzles sprinkled about.  There are even a few Easter Egg hunts.  No, not the videogame kind, but a genuine hunt for purposely hidden objects.

There are two points in the game, however, where even the densest flatfoot on the force would spot the villain, clap a pair of handcuffs on him and end the plot and the game right there.  Because of the generally light mood I shrugged these moments off.  Though there is one time when you're actively trying to help the bad guy.  You're not supposed to realize that, but you do. It makes for an awkward sequence.  Here you are knocking yourself out to solve a puzzle that you know will only set you back.

Now, if you’ll bear with me, there’s one aspect of the gameplay I’d like to discuss in detail.  In olden days, adventure game inventories were large and you just kept picking up more and more stuff, hoping you'd figure out what to do with it all down the road.  A classic example of this is Discworld, where towards the end you have something like forty or more inventory items.  This can make a game very challenging, as many players must have complained to game companies, because they rarely do this anymore.  Most often now, once you've used an inventory item, it disappears from your inventory.  That way you won't be tempted to try the toaster on the goldfish in the next scene, just in case.  This new policy does make sense, as the old burgeoning inventories were getting out of hand.  The problem with the new way is that the game gets a lot simpler.  Moreover, with the invention of hotspots, the modern adventure game simply became a matter of entering a room, scanning for the hotspots and then using up the collected items.  It got to the point were you didn't even look at the scenery.  Why bother?  It's the hotspots that count.

I recently played a game (Art of Murder) where the game designers tried to tackle this dilemma by not letting you pick up an obvious inventory item until you needed it.  This is not a good solution.  It's just annoying. In Nemesis, on the other hand, the hotspots simply don't appear until it's time for them to come into play.  At first I found this annoying too, until I realized it's not only more realistic, but again puts some of the challenge back into the gameplay.  It took a while to get used to, as I had to teach myself to enter a room, look at everything and try to imagine which items would come into play later.  Some were obvious, some not.  But it makes for a more Sherlock-like experience.

As for everything else about the game, the voice acting is fine, the music is also well done.  The soundtrack jukebox cycles through songs in a given location, which helps because you're going to be spending a fair amount of time in some of these joints.  The reproductions of the paintings and the historical sights and historical figures (like Queen Victoria) is also admirable. Particularly so in a 3D game.  Lots of polygons, I imagine.  On the technical side, the game played well on my new Vista machine even though it doesn't have a separate video card.  Thumbs way up for that.  This is the fourth entry in the Sherlock series from developer Frogwares (following The Awakened, The Silver Earring and The Mystery of the Mummy). I haven't played the earlier games, largely because I haven't had a fast enough computer until recently.

Most importantly, though, is that the game is fun.  It keeps you thinking, throws you a good number of curves, and for the most part is challenging but fair.  Some of the puzzles are simple, some less so, and every now and then you run into something that completely baffles you.  At least at first.  One of the game's puzzle "types" has you type in the answer to what really is a pop quiz question, usually from Sherlock.  Most of the answers are obvious, but a couple really had me scrambling.  With the many hand-written messages and riddles you get from Lupin, plus the type-in-the-answer puzzles, it's amusing to see the text adventure make a comeback in this otherwise ultramodern game engine.

One last minor complaint involves the ending.  I think they get a little carried away with the cleverness of their own plot because you'd need to be clairvoyant to discern the correct path to take at the end.  Everyone does now get to see the amusing closing scene just before the screen that tells you you've lost, but it's not fair.  Give us a chance to win, then let us decide to go back and play the other endings.

So, is Sherlock Holmes Nemesis a better game than The Case of the Rose Tattoo?  No, I wouldn't go that far.  But it is an excellent and entertaining game in its own right, one that Arthur Conan Doyle might well applaud.  Just make sure, if like me you suffer from video mal de mer, to have plenty of aspirin and some sort of plastic receptacle at hand.  It's rough seas ahead, but the destination's well worth the trip.

Final Grade: A- (find out more about our grading system)

If you liked this game, then Play: The Awakened Watch: The Seven-Per-Cent Solution Read: The Complete Online Sherlock Holmes

System Requirements:

• OS: Windows® 2000/XP/Vista™
• CPU: 1.3 GHz Pentium® 3 or Higher
• RAM: 512 MB
• Video Card: 128 MB DirectX® 9.0c Compatible
• Sound Card: DirectX® 9.0c
• DirectX®: DirectX® 9.0c or Higher (Included)
• CD-ROM: 4x
• Hard Drive Space: 3 GB Free
• Inputs: Keyboard, Mouse and Speakers