Parent's Guide: The Testament of Sherlock Holmes - Age rating, mature content and difficulty

The latest adventure for the great detective, The Testament of Sherlock Holmes plonks the player in his famous deerstalker hat, as they investigate a series of rather gruesome murders in and around central London. It quickly becomes apparent that the perpetrator has been going around poisoning people with a strange concoction that causes the victim to go crazy, often attacking themselves or whoever is within reach. As London's best detective, it's up to Sherlock Holmes and his assistant Watson to use his special brand of subterfuge and sleuthing to get to the bottom of the mystery.

A slow-paced point-and-click adventure, your time with the game will be spent wandering the cobbled streets of London and the various buildings within, hunting for clues, chatting to people, and interacting with various points of interest in each of the scenes. Highlighted with a blue magnifying glass or an image of a hand, selecting each object will result in a comment, zooming in for a closer look or a puzzle to solve - and once you've done everything there is to do with an object, the magnifying glass will turn green, making it easy to tell what's been done and what you still have left to look at.

While the game itself may be playable by pretty much anyone, the real difficulty spike here comes from the regular puzzles and leaps of logic that punctuate the game. Somewhat akin to those found in the Professor Layton adventures, one puzzle requires you to move a knight around a chess board in such a way as that every square gets stepped on once only, whereas another requires you to spot some fairly obscure patterns between number sequences and enter the missing the number to unlock a box. And while you can skip the puzzles, you can't skip over the deductions you're asked to do upon leaving each crime scene, and drawing the right connections between the right people, and putting everything you've learnt together to find the right motives for the crimes is challenging.

Seeing as The Testament of Sherlock Holmes deals with an usual set of murders, all linked by the same poison which invokes a madness resulting in the victim gnawing at various body parts, the game is generally a bit on the grisly side. Over the course of your investigation you'll be examining a few bodies (human and canine) covered in cuts, degenerating tissue and bite marks - and even performing an autopsy on a certain Mr. Kurtz, peeling back flesh, and spying into some of his internal organs in the process. Many of the crime scenes and bodies show evidence of torture too, with you talking to a trio of Russians later in the game who've been blinded, muted and deafened by their aggressors. Generally speaking, you don't actually see the violent acts taking place and just examine the aftermath, although there is one part where you witness a certain someone shooting themselves in the head with a pistol, seeing the blood spurt as the bullet connects.

There's also a rather creepy dream sequence cut-scene, where Watson wanders through a hospital talking to the various murder victims, all with gaping wounds and bloody mouths from their ordeals. It has undertones of those stereotypical horror films, where occasional close-ups of their disfigured faces flicker onto the screen from time to time, and could be a bit much for younger audiences.

Besides a decent helping of gore, the only other potentially questionable moment comes when Holmes pays a visit to Whitechapel's opium den littered with addicts, where he cooks up an unsavoury mix of sedatives in a syringe with which to knock out a guard.

Age Ratings

Format Reviewed: Xbox 360