Frogwares has revealed a new teaser trailer for its Sherlock Holmes the Awakened remake and achieved a major funding goal. It took the studio only thirty minutes to get thirty percent of its Kickstarter goal and just six hours to fully reach it. A part of what made this an impressive feat is that Frogwares had only just announced the game a week ago. The developers have announced that they’ve already reached their first stretch goal as well.
Dear friends, the moment is finally upon us. We’ve launched our Kickstarter! As of now, you can be part of Sherlock Holmes The Awakened history. Right now you can make a pledge and score yourself some really unique rewards. We have a collection of digital prizes, discounts, and you can even be included in the game too. If you’ve ever wanted to be a part of our Sherlock Holmes or a Lovecraftian game’s world, now is your chance.
We're stunned. It took just about 6 hours. You people are simply amazing. From the bottom of our hearts — thank you!
— Frogwares (@Frogwares) August 4, 2022
We'll be adding stretch goals soon, so please keep supporting.
To mark the occasion, we’re thrilled to share with you our Sherlock Holmes The Awakened reveal trailer. In this first official footage, we show a young Holmes and Watson fleeing for their lives. A “misunderstanding” of sorts has led the New Orlean Sheriffs’ Department to hunt down the duo. After a few near misses from some shotguns, the budding detectives escape into the depths of the surrounding swamps. But something seems noticeably off, let alone with Sherlock, who seems to already be losing his hold on reality.
Frogwares has also shared more details about the upcoming game that will be released on PC and consoles. The original game was made in 2006 and last year The Gamer rated it as #1 on its top “20 Best Lovecraftian Games For Horror Fans” so it will be interesting to see if the studio can retain the qualities of the first game with the remake that earned such praise.
- All new graphics and asset models
- New animations
- New cutscenes
- Additional investigation gameplay mechanics
- Rewriting the story to connect with the case from The Awakened to a younger Sherlock
- Amplifying the story behind how Watson and Holmes came to be so close
- Case story rewrites
- Additional side quests
- New English voice-over recordings and translations into multiple languages
- UI overall haul
- Change to 3rd person perspective camera
- Additional quality of life features
The developers have a lengthy post on their Kickstarter page detailing many other aspects of the game. Among them is something for those who are tired of games that essentially lead the player through every aspect of the game.
No Hand-Holding
The Awakened is being built on our established principle of creating gameplay that has as little hand-holding as possible. In short, the game will never blatantly tell you what to do next. As a detective, you need to think through your next steps. So there are no instructional checklists that you just follow blindly. No GPS map littered with markers giving you outright the exact location of every notable point or where to go next.
We provide you with various sleuthing tools to collect your clues. How you piece that all together to keep the case moving forward and ultimately coming to the right conclusion is all in your hands.
We do this because we want you to feel like an actual detective; figuring out the connection between clues and threads, thinking out your next steps, using your intuition to come up with theories, and testing them on the fly. It’s a design principle we’ve embraced to create an experience that is quite hard to find in most of today’s mainstream games, let alone horror ones.
A release date for Sherlock Holmes the Awakened has not yet been announced, other than in 2023, but could be soon forthcoming as the developers have previously said a large portion of the game is finished.
Source: Frogwares