Sherlock Holmes: The Silver Earring

I didn't quite plan on writing this review; but I wanted to add a little grain of salt to the varied rating this game has, as I've enjoyed it a good bit. For context, this isn't my first approach with the Frogwares Holmes' games. As of writing this, I've played through Crimes and Punishments, Devil's Daughter, Nemesis, Mystery of the Mummy (not thanks to the absolutely horrendous PC port) and Jack the Ripper, believing the latter to be the peak of the series. I've also read all classic Doyle stories about the detective pair; so I know what I'm talking about. This game is... tedious. Especially at the start there are a good deal of details you can very easily miss due to them being blended into the backgrounds, the controls are orthopedic at best (who the ♥♥♥♥ thought was a good idea to do timed puzzles in such a game??? And there's two of them???), and the story can get feel very convoluted, making one get lost easily. Ah, but I did say I enjoyed it, didn't I? With all my frustrations about it, I found it quite fun. Investigating around, making theories on my own... the game itself does have positive things, too. Sherlock and Watson feel just like this script was wrote by Doyle …

Tried to play this in 2026 — unsurprisingly, it hasn't aged well for modern displays. If you're on a current setup, expect these problems: - The clickable hotspots don't line up with the objects they belong to. Your cursor has to sit noticeably away from an item to trigger it, and the offset gets worse toward the edges of the screen. - Changing the resolution in the settings won't fix it — the misalignment comes from the game's internal coordinate maths, not the resolution itself. - Because of that, some interactive elements are a real pain to click, and a few end up effectively unreachable. There are workarounds, atleast according to some forums I stumbled upon but didn't try yet — forcing a 4:3 aspect ratio through your GPU control panel, or using a tool like DxWnd — I wasn't willing to install extra software or fight the game just to play it. Seems like a genuinely good storyline underneath, which is a shame. If Frogwares ever patched the aspect-ratio handling, it'd be worth another look.

Another horrible Sherlock game from the Sherlock collection. Every action is agonizingly slow, it's slower than some DOS games. Skip.

Decent enough storyline, but had to use a guide to get through some of the elements because it was so damn confusing on what the questions wanted. Not bad if you can get it cheap, but it's super clunky to control, even for point and click, and the voice acting is pretty poor.

Sherlock Holmes: The Silver Earring

There was a glitch in my version where you could not see the guard dog at Bromsby Cementworks so you couldn't get past that scene.