3/5 ★ – Zugzwanging's review of Sherlock Holmes: Crimes & Punishments.

While the controls may be clunky and unintuitive at times, Crimes & Punishments has a few unique things going for it. Fairly elegantly marrying theme and mechanics, the theory mind web brilliantly encapsulates the process of using deductions to lines of thinking, like "if/then." Maybe this shouldn't be as much of a highlight for me, but playing as Sherlock's bloodhound Toby to trace the culprit's scent might've made me smile way more than it should have. That being said, the game introduces a morality system, where you can choose who is arrested for the crime and whether you punish them to the full extent of the law, but nothing ever comes of it. Besides a little adjective describing your Sherlock, future cases never vary depending on your final choice (both in terms of suspect and punishment). I'm all for morality quandaries in games, but if you are going to introduce them, then they must mean something. Empty moral dilemmas make a game's direction feel aimless, and in this case more specifically, it makes the theme of this specific Sherlock installment an afterthought, when it really shouldn't.