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Legacy Interactive’s The Lost Cases of 221B Baker St. (hereafter referred to as The Lost Cases) is a hidden object game for the iPhone. It plays out like an interactive book of I SPY with the theme being Sherlock Holmes solving murder cases.
After a short introduction that tells you the premise of your case, which is randomized to a degree much less than the way that Diablo randomized its dungeons, you are free to select a room and start exploring.
Here you will spend much of the game.
Amidst a backdrop of artful … art are 3 items that you are tasked to find. Now, these 3 items are either related to the case or not. On a portable device this works out well enough since you can quickly ascertain where objects are making games last about as long as a short bus ride.
The Lost Cases is not a challenging game but it has merit in its respect for the player’s time. Once you find the item inside the room, Holmes deduces automatically whether these are important at all. For my cases, he would find some blood on a knife or something like that.
After you find all the items in a room, you simply move onto another room.
Each case has 4 rooms that you find objects in. No, you cannot search the whole murder house and find the clues for yourself. The game narrows it down to 4 rooms from the start. Once you finish, you are presented with a screen that has possible suspects, weapons and motives (very much like a game of Clue) and you decide what the true pieces of evidence are.
This is all very easy as long as you remember what Holmes said when you found the items. He does all the deducing for you. After that, based on your solve time you are given a score which is then compared against a high score table.
Where The Lost Cases shines is its replayability and randomization. I was amused to find that my cases were often very different from each other.
That said, the game is very elementary (my dear Watson). The game leads you and you are only able to make a real choice at the end when you solve the case. It’s quite simple for anyone to remember Holmes’ declarations of evidence so solving the case isn’t ever a problem unless you are preoccupied with something.
The game is well factored to the iPhone’s screen and the art is very catching in its style. The objects aren’t very difficult to find unless you don’t know what some items look like as some people may not know what a ledger or cricket bat look like. I did, by the way. Don’t look at me like that.
All-in-all, the game works for the genre and the portable platform. This game would suit any hidden object gamer’s library and works for a short game. Again, it strikes me a bit unfair that for a Holmes game I am not able to solve the cases in any way other than just remembering what Holmes said a couple moments ago but in a way that quickens the game’s pace.
I feel like I’ve told you everything there is to know about this game and should you want to make your own opinion, check out the developer’s website at www.legacygames.com. As I understand it, they have more fleshed out versions of this game for the PC if this takes your fancy.
6/10
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