The examinations of the crime scenes stick fairly close to the real events, which means that Holmes – and the player – must make trapeze-like manoeuvres of reasoning that don’t really feel like the methods of a character famous for near-scientifically rigorous deduction. Wildly inconsistent witness reports are smoothed over into representing the same man by speculative discussions of lighting conditions. Holmes makes definitive conclusions about the knife the killer wields by doing tests using a selection of only four blades. The re-enactments are presented with a certain gloomy flare – for example, to test the knives, Holmes and Watson borrow an abandoned butcher’s shop and perform the tests on pigs’ heads. The solutions, however, seem to be more based on dubious speculation about the real case rather than inventing more definitive clues for Holmes to discover.

To that end, Frogwares designed a very competent user interface to represent abstract thought. The most prominent of these is the “deduction” board, in which the player must select deductions from a list of three options based on observations made at the scene, which are then combined together to draw secondary deductions, and finally, conclusions. It’s a solid mechanic for making you think about the case, and it pushes the player into drawing the developer’s intended conclusions. There are other abstract interfaces too, such as timelines that require you to place events in order to determine when a murder occurred. A lot of this isn’t really a challenge and could all be handled with simple dialogue, but that would remove some of the fun of “doing it yourself”.

Unlike previous Sherlock games, there are no points at which you are asked to type answers to questions. This makes the game easier, but that’s not necessarily a good thing. At its best, the typed response mechanic functions as a “gate” that not only checks whether the player has been following the plot carefully, but allows you to make a Holmes’-style deduction unaided. Here even trial-and-error can lead you to the correct answers. Still, the deduction-based gameplay is quite unlike anything else on the market these days, and it serves the function of really involving you in solving crimes and trying to triangulate your efforts with Holmes’, which is an entertaining process.

As well as the investigation sections, which mix these deduction-themed exercises with hotspot searches for evidence (a press of the space bar highlights all examinable objects, which removes any potential frustration), there are a mixture of other puzzles. Many are inventory-based, and often involve constructing some device to solve a physical problem, or giving items to non-playable characters. These generally feel less arbitrary than some of the full-screen code-cracking exercises peppered throughout (everyone in Victorian London, apparently, used their own idiosyncratic system of locks) or the other zoomed-in, often abstract mechanical puzzles. An electric lift, for example, requires you to join dots together on a grid using cardinal lines; these are supposed to represent wires and circuits, but once again it does rather feel as if the developers are just throwing unconnected puzzles at you occasionally that have nothing to do with Jack the Ripper. Although the game is a reasonable length overall, that’s partly because it has been extended by using these distractions. At least the puzzles are often enjoyable on their own merits, and normally fairly easy to solve. In fact, you are generally told very specifically where to go and what to do, often making movement between locations totally linear. This does keep the game moving, but it makes you feel funnelled down a very specific interpretation of the events.

The game is also a little lacking in the audio department. The soundscapes of Whitechapel and the classical music are pleasant, but they may sound rather familiar from past games in the series. The voice acting and dialogue scripting, too, leave a bit to be desired. Whilst Holmes’ and Watson’s voices are good, it sometimes sounds like the actors have been given their lines without direction. Holmes, for example, disguises himself as a workman at one point, but doesn’t change his voice in conversations, except for a couple of sentences in which his chimbly-sweep impression sounds bizarrely out of place. On a similar note, the voice of the urchin from the Baker Street Irregulars, Holmes’ network of child informers, is remarkably strange and painful. He sounds like an American stage-school child given an intolerable mockney script and two minutes to prepare.

Adding to the problems, the rest of the writing is pretty unconvincing as well. Frogwares are good at putting together – or in this case, retelling – a decent story, but some of the script is incredibly anachronistic. I have my doubts that Doyle’s Sherlock would ever exclaim “Lookie here!”, for example. The game also produces newspaper reports using modern fonts, and dozens of other silly errors or misplaced elements that pull you directly out of the experience, not least that the written subtitles often fail to match perfectly with the dialogue. There is, for instance, an ocean of difference between a “black fellow” and a “fellow on the black-market”.

The characters you meet, fortunately, are varied and often interesting, such as the stoic doctor at the clinic, the Jewish tradesmen (who sporadically found themselves scapegoats for the murders), and of course the prostitutes. Holmes and Watson themselves are clearly well-researched, and fit the essence of the characters described by Doyle, even if a detail or two may seem a little jarring. There’s even an especially nice reference to another Holmes’ story right at the end, which raised a smile.

To Frogwares’ credit, their version of the killer’s identity does seem plausible, and omits the sort of wild fantasy found in other Ripper-themed fiction. Still, this game is a case of one step forward, two steps back for the series. Whilst major improvements have been made over past entries – the excellent graphics, the two control options – the new theme doesn’t entirely gel. It might sound like a good match to pair up the most notorious villain of the Victorian era with the most famous literary detective, but it just doesn’t fit with the series’ gameplay smoothly, and is strangely limited in terms of plot, feeling very prosaic and small-scale. Even with some of the unnecessary digressions, the main investigation is definitely enjoyable, however, and well worth playing if you like the series or the characters involved here. Sherlock Holmes vs. Jack the Ripper is an unexpectedly sedentary and thoughtful game, and it’s far from bloody awful, if not quite the ripping good yarn it could have been.