Sherlock Holmes: The Devil’s Daughter is an absolutely miserable sequel to Crimes and Punishments.
The deduction system is basically identical to Crimes and Punishments. So you gather facts by investigating, combine facts to form deductions, and by interpreting the deductions form a theory of the crime as a whole. It does however feel like they’re more lenient about having all the facts line up perfectly. So if you have two suspects, it’s e.g. totally ok to say that both of them were capable of committing the crime (though of course you’d use other deductions to exclude one of them). In the previous game those two deductions would have nonsensically conflicted each other. The other change is that the person observation minigame now requires you to give an interpretation on some of the observations. Though I don’t think it actually matters.
Everything else… The minigames and action sequences are longer, more numerous, more tedious, and occasionally even unskippable. Just in the first case you have a 15 minute shadowing sequence, a bootshining minigame, a tightrope balancing minigame, a chimney sweeping minigame, and a 10 minute chase sequence. I failed all of them at least once, some multiple times. Later on you get gems such as a 30 minute hallucination sequence with I think five separate subpuzzles of walking through rooms with different kinds of traps. Or another case with a 15 minute Tomb Raider puzzle of pushing boxes, pulling levers, raising and lowering water levels, and so on. An unskippable QTE fight sequence so obtuse that I had to try it over 10 times.
Frogwares wanted to make an action game, and unfortunately chose to do it by retrofitting the action into an existing game series where it does not fit at all. But it seems pretty clear that something else had to be cut to provide space for this. In this case it’s actual story content; there’s just four actual cases + a short epilogue with no actual detective work. And these are not good cases. One is totally trivial, two don’t make any sense, and one is ok with a very neat accident reconstruction scenario. (A friend had recommended that last case. Getting to it was the only reason I persevered through this whole game).
There’s an overarching story that’s awful to start with, but is made worse by having the characters make no sense at all. Holmes has suddenly acquired a daughter from somewhere, and the interactions with her are just cringeworthy. In another case he is for some reason hosting an actor at his apartment, and is endlessly patient with said actors interference with an investigation. Watson has turned into some kind of a fop but it’s fine since he’s mostly absent anyway.
Avoid.