You can populate this place with paintings, furniture and possessions, filling out its character and history, a decent metaphor for your progress through the story and the game.
The doors of Sherlock’s decrepit, abandoned family manor unlock for him as he remembers more, slowly piecing together what happened to his mother. This is an inexplicably unfriendly visual design decision, made more annoying by the fact that detective vision needs a few seconds to recharge. As someone with a minor visual impairment I had to squint to make these tiny dots out – and then, at nighttime, fireflies appear, which are also small yellow dots. Holmes has a detective-vision ability that highlights important objects with a small, white circle that looks like a crosshair, or a small yellow dot. I really could have done without having to listen to Jon berate me before every subsequent attempt. Frustratingly, the game requires you to piece together crime scenes, evidence, archival research and mind-palace deductions perfectly, but it’s not always clear what its version of perfect entails, and it’s easy to get it slightly wrong. He whines when I don’t get the right solution, or ask the wrong questions, offering only criticism and no hints, which was pointless and off-putting. Accompanying Sherlock is his imaginary friend, Jon – a role later to be played by his chronicler Dr John Watson.
