Sherlock Holmes: The Devil’s Daughter asks the world’s most famous detective to do something he has never done before: keep a secret instead of reveal one. Frogwares built its 2016 adventure around that idea, and the result is a game that swings between sharp detective work and clumsy action. It scores 6.7 of 10.
Trailer, via IGDBcom.
Katelyn, Alice, and 221C
The story picks up after The Testament of Sherlock Holmes. Professor James Moriarty is dead, and Holmes is raising Moriarty’s daughter, Katelyn, while hiding her true origin. Then a woman calling herself “Alice” moves in next door at 221C and starts befriending Katelyn, driving a wedge between father and daughter.
That premise is the strongest thing in the game. Holmes spends five linked cases confronting dark family secrets while Alice works her way into his household. The source material asks the right questions: what led Katelyn to 221B Baker Street, did she uncover the truth about her father, and what does the charming clairvoyant actually want?
For once, the detective’s problem is not a puzzle to solve but a truth to bury. That inversion gives The Devil’s Daughter a hook the earlier games never had.
A Deduction Board That Actually Matters
The core loop will be familiar to anyone who played Crimes & Punishments. You explore crime scenes, examine clues, and add what you find to a deduction board. Linking pieces of information opens different conclusions. Connect enough of them and you build a full tree of deductions in Holmes’s mind palace.
Depending on how you read the clues, you can arrive at the wrong answer. You can fail to find the culprit. That is a real mechanic, not a marketing line, and it remains the series’ best idea. Interrogations, testimony and evidence all feed the same system, and the game lets you live with what you chose.
The action sequences are where this falls apart. The source promises intense action sequences and a game that tests the limits of your nerves. What the design actually delivers is first-person and third-person exploration interrupted by set pieces that the deduction board never touches. The two halves do not talk to each other.
Five Cases, One of Them Worth the Trip
The game runs five self-contained cases. Apart from in-game achievements and moral choices, they do not connect to one another. That structure is a weakness. The Alice and Katelyn thread is the reason to play, and it sits outside the cases rather than inside them.
The standout is “Prey Tell.” A boy named Tom Hurst hires Holmes because his father George has gone missing. With Wiggins, a local orphan, Holmes traces a string of disappearances to Lord Marsh, a distinguished British benefactor. Marsh and his aristocratic friends hunt paupers as prey in Epping Forest. George Hurst, a former British Army marksman, found out after an impoverished former squadmate became quarry for Marsh’s group, and he is now planning to turn the tables at the next hunt.
Holmes goes to Epping Forest, avoids the hunters, and watches Hurst kill two of them and capture Marsh. Then the game hands you the choice: let Hurst kill Marsh gruesomely, kill Marsh yourself for a quick death, or kill Hurst and turn Marsh over to the police.
That is the game at its best. A moral decision with no clean answer, built on evidence you gathered yourself, in a case that says something ugly about class and cruelty. “A Study in Green,” which drops Holmes into a lawn bowls tournament hosted by the chairman of the local Archaeological society, does not reach the same height.
The Score, and What It Means
The Devil’s Daughter holds a 6.7/10 critic aggregate across 8 outlets. That number is fair. It is not a bad game. It is an uneven one, and the unevenness is structural rather than cosmetic.
Frogwares knows how to build an investigation. The deduction board and mind palace are genuinely clever systems, and the studio has been refining them for years. The problem is that The Devil’s Daughter keeps interrupting them. Every time the game cuts to an action beat, it loses the thread it just spent twenty minutes pulling.
The Alice storyline deserves better than the cases surrounding it. A clairvoyant neighbor manipulating a detective’s adopted daughter is a thriller premise with real teeth, and the game treats it as connective tissue between five largely unrelated mysteries. The emotional stakes are announced, then parked.
The Nintendo Switch version arrived on April 7, 2022, six years after the original release. The PC version came first, on June 10, 2016, with PlayStation 4 and Xbox One following on October 25. That staggered rollout is worth noting only because it shows how long this game has been circulating without anyone fixing its central imbalance.
What matters here is the choice architecture. The Devil’s Daughter lets you fail, and it lets you fail in ways that feel like your fault rather than the game’s. That is rare, and it is the reason to sit through the weaker cases. The action sequences are noise. The deduction board is the signal.
If Frogwares ever builds a game that trusts its own investigation systems for the full runtime, it will have something special. The Devil’s Daughter is not that game. It is a good detective story trapped inside a mediocre action game, and the trap is the review.
KEY FACTS
– Score: 6.7/10 (IGDB critic aggregate, 8 outlets)
– Developer: Frogwares
– Publisher: Bigben Interactive
– Platforms: PlayStation 4, PC (Microsoft Windows), Xbox One, Nintendo Switch
– PC release: June 10, 2016
– PlayStation 4 and Xbox One release: October 25, 2016
– Nintendo Switch release: April 7, 2022
– Genre: Puzzle, Adventure
– Modes: Single player
– Perspective: First person, third person
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