The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes is a 1992 point and click adventure game from EA.
The story works surprisingly well for an adventure game from that era. The mystery starts out small, but expands and changes in nature through most of the game. There’s a large cast of characters and locations, which open up very naturally through the game. And for at least some of the locations there’s reason to visit them several time through the game. So it feels surprisingly non-linear.
The actual detective-work is a very mixed bag. There’s a ton of pixel-hunting. Most of it’s not too bad, but there’s some that were as unfair as anything I’ve ever seen. Most of the conversations with people are purely about exhausting the full conversation tree, and maybe coming back to ask more question if you’ve found out something new that they might react to. There is no need for you as the player to have any understanding of the case, Holmes does it all for you.
Except… There’s a few places where it looks like they initially had a lot more ambition than that. For example in the initial scene you have a chat with Lestrade, who thinks that the murder you’ve been called to is the work of Jack the Ripper. You can try to convince him otherwise with a menu-driven conversation. And it’s a conversation tree with a bunch of total nonsense, non-sequiturs, untrue claims of facts, and then the actual things that you’ve found out from the crime scene that point out to the killer being someone else.
Or in a couple of other places you’re tracking down specific people based on vague clues you’ve found out about them. You describe a person to a shopkeeper, who then wants to know how tall the guy was, their build, the color of their hair, was there anything special about them, etc. And none of this is spelled out, you did actually need to look at the clues and think about the answer. I think you can’t even answer all of them with the information you have: and if you try to guess about the things you can’t possibly know, the conversation will be shunted to a dead-end branch. You need to actually admit when you don’t know something.
It’s this glimpse into what they were trying to do that kept me playing. Unfortunately being wrong in these discussions has no consequences, they’re pretty rare, and they’re always strictly about facts. They aren’t really about things you’ve cleverly deduced.
The puzzle design is odd. There’s way too many hidden compartments etc. around. Or places where you need to repeat the same action multiple times with no sign that you’re going to eventually get a different result. But then there’s a few places that are just hilarious misdirections.
Like someone tells you “I won’t believe that X is dead unless I see something official, like a death certificate”; you go to morgue, and indeed the medical examiner has just produced one! Too bad they absolutely refuse to give that to you; it’s absolutely against policy. It’s going to be yet another one of those puzzles where you need to get them out of the room so that you can just brazenly steal the stuff, right? Or one where you need to chase people around for a permission slip. But really… The original guy you needed to talk to wasn’t looking specifically for a death certificate, just something more than merely your word. How about you just buy a newspaper? :-D
Anyway, TLFoSH isn’t really worth playing. It had some interesting ideas, and a larger scope than any more modern detective game I’ve played. But there’s just too much '90s adventure game bullshit to deal with, too much watching Holmes be a genius, and not enough of actually having to think about the case yourself.