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The trick to Arthur Conan Doyle's original Sherlock Holmes stories is that they aren't, strictly speaking, "Sherlock Holmes stories", but stories about Sherlock Holmes, written by the esteemed Dr John Watson. Baker Street's most eminent physician might exist in a state of hapless befuddlement but without his disarming narration, these tales of mystery and conspiracy wouldn't be nearly as affecting. Holmes may do the actual detecting, but it's Watson who, as both spectator and accomplice, builds suspense throughout the case, mirrors the reader's awe at each masterstroke of deduction, and creates sympathy for the chilly, obsessive, self-destructive personality at the story's core. In Frogware's enjoyable but undercooked Sherlock Holmes and the Devil's Daughter, poor old Watson is just another sidekick, banished from the stage for entire episodes, who serves mostly to provide covering fire during rickety action sequences or cough up the odd piece of medical trivia. The removal (as in Frogware's previous Sherlock titles) of the old framing narrative was perhaps advisable, given that point-and-click adventure games are about solving things and Watson's role as narrator was, basically, to marvel that things have been solved, but something vital has been sacrificed nonetheless.
In a sense, though, these are still stories that revolve around a symbiotic partnership, between the bleak, supernaturally attuned perspective of Sherlock and an everyman interlocutor. It's just that Watson is now you, the player - another useful idiot who can be relied upon to carry out tedious but essential donkeywork such as clicking objects in the right order or shoving crates around. You'll also be called upon to pick a conclusion once all of an episode's clues have been harvested, but it's a choice of which script thread you want to follow, which rabbit you want Sherlock to pull from the hat, rather than what you actually make of the evidence itself.
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