![]() You can piece together flashback sequences in a vaguely Vanishing of Ethan Carter style, or switch to Sherlock’s version of Assassin Creed’s Eagle Vision, where all turns monochrome allowing tiny details to reveal themselves to your razor-sharp intuition.īest of all, you can flip at any point to Deduction mode, linking clues together in the great detective’s mind, building symbolic neural pathways that eventually lead to a conviction. You’ll twist objects around to search for clues and markings, or take them back to Baker Street for analysis with your primitive Victorian lab. You’ll spend time in close-up analysis of a cast of rogues and innocents, spotting signs of illness, malnutrition, mania, depravity and worse. When the games at it’s best, you’ll feel like a master detective. There are four main cases to work through, in each one you’ll find yourself travelling between crime scenes, private clubs, residences, 221b Baker Street and Scotland Yard, scouring for clues to analyse, interviewing key characters and filling your casebook. In many ways, this is the continuation of 2014’s Crimes and Punishments: a 3D graphic adventure with an emphasis on collecting facts, putting them together and creating a solution to solve each crime. Now, with The Devil’s Daughter, the process that began with 2012’s The Testament of Sherlock Holmes seems to have reached some kind of logical conclusion, with a Holmes that’s roughly two-thirds Conan Doyle to one-third Nathan Drake. Starting with a more traditional reading of the great detective, they’ve moved on to cover inspired mash-ups against Jack the Ripper and the Cthulu before settling down into a take that mixes classic Victoriana with a slightly younger, less purely celebral Holmes. In games his transformations have been no less strange or radical, thanks to Frogware’s quietly successful series of adventures. On the box, he’s become both Benedict Cumberbatch’s ice-cold genius and Jonny Lee Miller’s eccentric addict. On the big screen he’s been reinvented as Robert Downey Jnr’s intellectual action hero and Sir Ian McKellen’s age-worn sleuth. These are strange days for Sherlock Holmes. But then, that’s rather the point.Available on Xbox One (version reviewed), PS4, PC Through Meredith’s reconnected friendships (and a couple of nascent romances), the gently mundane business of delivering parcels, and scenic drives, Lake meditates on the virtues of the quiet life over the big city, and reaches no grand or revelatory conclusions. It’s a good-looking place to drive around for a few hours, listening to country songs played on the local radio (or, if country music makes you come out in hives, a soothing ambient soundtrack). But time and money have clearly been directed towards Providence Oaks itself, a collection of quaint houses, pretty trees and quiet roads around an expanse of shining water, beautiful under changing skies and weather. There are a lot of quick cuts here in place of animations – the game fades briefly to black when getting in and out of the van, for instance – and it can be pretty buggy: sometimes conversations ended abruptly, or I would load a save to find the van spinning its wheels vainly on its side. This keeps the story focused and, of course, the development costs down. Supporting actors such as Meredith’s boss and her parents are only ever heard over the telephone. Set in 1986, the game keeps things to a very small cast of characters – Meredith’s childhood best friend, the farmer who’s also local radio DJ, a lumberjack, the owner of the new VHS store in town – and the rekindled relationships between them. If you’re the kind of person who actually tries to follow traffic laws in Grand Theft Auto, this will be your vibe. Thankfully, nobody really cares the van can’t get damaged, you can’t drive into the lake, and you can’t run anybody over. I drive on the wrong side of the road, crash into things constantly, and park in the middle of the street. Once you abandon expectations for some action and sink into the daily rhythm, it’s a relaxing time. You deliver the post, you talk to residents, you gently examine Meredith’s life choices. I kept waiting for something a bit Twin Peaks to happen, or for some small-town drama to bubble up into something more exciting, but it never did. ![]() There’s no big twist in this gentle slice-of-life game about driving around a beautiful, entirely unremarkable American environment in a post van. But actually … no, wait, that’s exactly what does happen. W hen Meredith Weiss – a 44-year-old computer programmer with a demanding job and a pushy boss – returns to Providence Oaks, the small lake town in which she grew up, she thinks she’s only going to be covering her father’s mail route for two weeks.
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