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The Case of the Rose Tattoo

19 Aug

What is it that we love about Sherlock Holmes?

We love the times in which he lived, of course, the half-remembered, half-forgotten times of snug Victorian illusion, of gas-lit comfort and contentment, of perfect dignity and grace. The world was poised precariously in balance, and rude disturbances were coming with the years, but those who moved upon the scene were very sure that all was well — that nothing ever would be any worse nor ever could be any better…

— Edgar W. Smith

The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes: Case of the Serrated Scalpel was an unusually quiet sort of computer game. It was quiet when you played it, being a game that rewarded contemplation as much as action, and one that placed as much emphasis on its text as its audiovisuals. It was quietly released in 1992 by Electronic Arts, a publisher well along by that point in their transition from being a collective of uncompromising “software artists” to becoming the slick, bottom-lined-focused populist juggernaut we know and don’t always love today. And yet, despite being so out of keeping with EA’s evolving direction, Serrated Scalpel quietly sold a surprising number of units over a span of several years.

That unexpected success had consequences. First it led EA to fund a 1994 re-imagining of the game for the 3DO living-room console, featuring video clips of live actors voicing dialog that had previously appeared only as text on the screen. And then, with the MS-DOS original still selling at a steady clip — in fact, rounding by now the magical 100,000-unit milestone — it led to a somewhat belated full-fledged sequel, which was released in mid-1996.

The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes: Case of the Rose Tattoo was largely the work of the same crew that had made its predecessor, notwithstanding the gap between the two projects. Once again, R.J. Berg, a former EA manual writer and perpetual Sherlock Holmes fan to the Nth power, wrote the script and generally masterminded the endeavor. And once again a small outfit called Mythos Software, based in Tempe, Arizona, handled all of the practicalities of the script’s transformation into a game, from the art to the programming.

Indeed, Rose Tattoo as a whole is very much a case of not fixing what wasn’t broken in one of my favorite adventure games of the 1990s, so much so that I almost fear that this review will come across as superfluous to those who have already read my homage to the original. The one really obvious difference is a reflection of the four years separating the two games’ release dates, over the course of which the technology of the typical home computer advanced considerably. So, Rose Tattoo is able to present its version of Victorian London with a more vivid clarity, thanks to a screen resolution of 640 X 480 rather than 320 X 200. More ingeniously, Mythos has found a middle ground between the pure pixel graphics of the original game and the awkwardly spliced video clips of the 3DO remake. “Sprites” made from real actors are shrunk down and inserted directly into pre-rendered 3D scenery, making an almost seamless fit.

Otherwise, though, Rose Tattoo is the purest form of sequel, striving not just to duplicate but to positively double down on everything its precursor did. In some contexts, that might be read as a condemnation. But not in this one: Serrated Scalpel was such a breath of fresh air that more of the same can only be welcome.

Once again, then, we have here a plot that is ironically more believable than the majority of Arthur Conan Doyle’s own Sherlock Holmes tales. Like Broken Sword, another standout adventure from the standout adventure-gaming year of 1996, Rose Tattoo kicks its proceedings off with a literal bang: it opens with Sherlock’s portly brother Mycroft Holmes getting seriously injured by an explosion at his Diogenes Club that everyone is all too eager to blame on a gas leak — “the price of progress,” as they all like to say. Even Sherlock initially refuses to believe otherwise; deeply distraught over his brother’s condition, he retreats into his bedroom to take refuge in his various chemical addictions. Thus you actually begin the game as John Watson, trying to dig up enough clues to shake Sherlock out of his funk and get him working on the case.

Once that has been accomplished, the game is truly afoot. Rather than a random gas explosion, the “accident” at the Diogenes Club turns out to be a deliberate murder plot that is connected to the theft of vital secrets from the British War Office. Your need to avenge Mycroft’s suffering will plunge you into the geopolitics of the late nineteenth century; you’ll even meet face to face with the young Kaiser Wilhelm II of the newly minted nation of Germany, who is depicted here as an intelligent, cultured, and to some extent even open-minded leader, one whose political philosophy has not yet hardened into the reactionary conservatism of his First World War persona. The game captures in their nascent form the political changes and even the evolution of the weaponry of war that would lead to the horrific conflicts of the first half of the twentieth century.

But that is only a small piece of the history which Rose Tattoo allows us to witness up close and personal. The usual videogame’s view of history encompasses war and politics and little else. Rose Tattoo, on the other hand, fastidiously recreates a fascinating time and place in social history, when the world that we know today was in many ways in the process of being invented. Your investigation takes you across the width and breadth of Victorian London and to all of its diverse social strata, from fussy lords and ladies who seem to be perpetually singing “Rule, Britannia!” under their breath to underground radicals who surface just long enough to preach their revolutionary philosophy of Marxism at Speaker’s Corner every Sunday. You visit clubs, hospitals, police departments, morgues, flats, townhouses, lofts, squats, mansions, palaces, monuments, tailors, bathhouses, billiard rooms, photography studios, animal emporiums, parks, gardens, aerodromes, laboratories, greengrocers, phrenologist’s offices, minister’s offices, barrister’s offices, warehouses, and opium dens, all of them presented in rich, historically accurate detail. “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life,” said Samuel Johnson. Indeed.

As in the first game, Sherlock Holmes’s iconic flat at 221B Baker Street serves as the starting point of your investigations and the home base to which you continually return. In addition to being a tribute to Sherlock’s wide-ranging curiosity, it’s a vastly more effective virtual museum of Victoriana than the real one that stands at that London address today. Spend some time here just rummaging about, and maybe follow some of its leads with some independent research of your own, and you’ll begin to feel the frisson of life in this amazing city, the melting pot of the Western world circa 1890. A small sample of the exhibits on hand:

But lest all of this start to sound like a tedious exercise in “edutainment,” know that the whole experience is enlivened enormously by R.J. Berg’s writing, which is even more finely honed here than it was in the first game, managing to be both of the time it depicts and an ongoing delight to read in 1996, 2022, or any other year. He takes a special delight in lacerating with delicate savagery the city’s many stuffed shirts, useless layabouts, and pretentious fools. (Perhaps we can learn something about character from appearance after all, at least in the world of this game…)

  • Chinless and tending to fat, this young man sits like a beluga whale in a steam cabinet. His hooded eyes are partially closed and rivulets of sweat pour down his face. It is not possible to say whether he is enjoying himself.
  • The lady masquerades as a debutante. Dressed in a hideous crepe gown, she has the carriage of a Palladium chorus girl. Possessed only of pretensions, she displays none of the high style to which she aspires.
  • The corpulent, self-important clerk is fussily dressed. If he runs true to form, he spends his leisure time and money indulging passions for art books and Belgian chocolates.
  • The man could pass as a mortician or a bank manager. Below his high domed forehead, his pale, pitted face wears a preternaturally neutral expression. The slow reptilian oscillation of his head is disconcerting.

Then there’s my absolute favorite turn of phrase: “Bledsoe awaits with the equanimity of a ring-tailed lemur in a room full of rocking chairs.

And yet Berg seldom punches down, and is by no means without compassion for the ones who were not born with silver spoons stuck firmly up their derrières: “Like thousands of indigent girls, she was sucked to the city at fourteen by the promise of twelve pounds per annum and a bed in the attic. After 40 years in service, enduring drudgery, discomfort, insult, and every sort of meanness, she has risen to become Assistant Housekeeper at the Cavendish Hotel.”


Sherlock, Watson, and the indomitable Wiggins, head of the Baker Street Irregulars, outside 221B Baker Street. While the game’s graphics aren’t breathtaking, they are, like everything else about it, quietly apropos.

Investigating a suspicious death in the morgue. There will be more than one such corpse to examine before all is said and done.

On one of the newly constructed Thames Embankments, next to Cleopatra’s Needle, recently looted by the British Empire from Alexandria.

The bucolic environs of St James’s Park. We have need of that boy’s new pet dog, which happens to be the best tracker in all of London. Hmm… what could we offer the boy for it?


In addition to gobs of historical verisimilitude and some of the best writing to appear in a game since the heyday of Infocom, Rose Tattoo shares with its predecessor a gratifyingly grounded approach to puzzles. There are problems to solve here, many of which veteran adventure gamers will find very familiar in the abstract, such as the inordinate quantity of human gatekeepers who must be circumvented in one way or another in order to gain access to the spaces they guard. But, instead of employing ludicrously convoluted solutions that could only appear in an adventure game, solving these “puzzles” mostly entails doing what a reasonable person would under similar circumstances. A surprising number of the gatekeepers can be bypassed, for instance, simply by acquiring an official letter from Scotland Yard authorizing you to investigate the case, then showing it to the obstacle in question. Rose Tattoo resists the adventure genre’s centrifugal drift toward slapstick comedy as well any game ever made; Sherlock never gets up to anything really ridiculous, never surrenders his dignity as the world’s most famous detective. He does nothing in this game that one couldn’t imagine him doing in one of Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories.

As must be abundantly clear by now, I love this game dearly; it joins Serrated Scalpel on the short list of my favorite point-and-click graphic adventures of all time. It must also be acknowledged, however, that it aligns crazily well with my own background and interests. I spent my years in and around university immersed in this setting, reading tens of thousands of pages of Dickens, Eliot, and Trollope (the last being my favorite; as Prime Minister Harold Macmillan once said, “there’s nothing better than going to bed early with a Trollope”). And yes, I read my share of Arthur Conan Doyle as well. Playing Rose Tattoo is like coming home for me.

But, to state the obvious, I am me and you are you, and your experience of Rose Tattoo may very well be different. I can all too easily imagine another person finding this game more exhausting than fascinating. It’s out of step with the fashion even of 1996, never mind today, in that it expects you to read all of its long descriptions; only the diegetic words — i.e., those actually spoken by the characters in the game — are voiced. And you can’t just ignore all of the Victorian bric-à-brac that litter its many scenes because there is in fact a smattering of vital clues and objects to be found amongst the clutter. Further, there’s little here to satisfy hardcore puzzle fiends; that ancient adventure-game saw of the newspaper shoved under the door to retrieve the key pushed out of the lock with the pin is about as elaborate as things ever get from that perspective. Solving the mystery rather hinges on collecting physical evidence, interviewing witnesses, and deducing on a broader canvas than that of the individual puzzle.

Of course, a point-and-click adventure game is a discrete possibility space, which means that you could solve the mystery by brute force — by going around and around and around the map of London, talking to everyone and picking up whatever isn’t nailed down and showing it to everyone. But to do so would be to miss the point entirely, in addition to subjecting yourself to mind-numbing tedium. I would rather encourage you to make full use of the in-game journal, in which the tireless Watson records every word of every conversation Sherlock has, and which can even be saved as a text file for perusal outside of the game. (Incidentally: all of the text, in the journal and elsewhere, uses British spellings, despite this being an American game — another nice touch.) I would encourage you, that is to say, to enter into the spirit of the thing and really try to solve the mystery yourself, as a real detective might. I can promise you that it does hang together, and that the game will reward you for doing so in a way that very few other alleged interactive mysteries — excepting its precursor, naturally — can match. If all of those words in the journal and locations on the map start to feel overwhelming, don’t worry about it: just take a break. The mystery will still be waiting for you when you come back. The Victorian Age was a foreign country; they did things more slowly there.

But if all of that is still a bit too tall of an order in this hurly-burly modern world of ours, that’s okay too. No game is for everyone, and this one perhaps less so than many. Certainly it was an anomaly at the time of its release, being about as out of step with an increasingly go-go, bang-bang gaming market as anything could be. Doubtless for that reason, EA released it with almost no fanfare, just as they had its predecessor. Alas, this time it didn’t defy its low expectations once it reached store shelves: it didn’t become a sleeper success like Case of the Serrated Scalpel. The magazines seemed to pick up on the disinterest of the game’s own publisher. Computer Gaming World, the closest thing the United States had to a gaming journal of record, never even gave it a full review, contenting themselves with a two-paragraph capsule summary whose writer betrayed little sign of ever having played it, who made the inexplicable claim that it “tried too hard to be an interactive movie”; in reality, no 1996 graphic adventure was less movie-like.

So, that was that for the Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes series. R.J. Berg continued working for EA as a producer, designer, and writer for years, but on less unique fare that gave him less opportunity to deploy his deliciously arch writerly voice. Mythos Software survived until about 2003 as a developer of multimedia educational products — they were behind the popular BodyWorks series of anatomical explorations — but never made another straight-up game.

Still, to complain that we didn’t get more of these games seems churlish. Better to be thankful that the stars aligned in such a way as to give us the two that we do have. Check them out sometime, when you’re in the mood for something a bit more on the quiet and thoughtful side. Maybe, just maybe, you’ll come to feel the same way about them that I do.

(Sources: Electronic Games of February 1993, Computer Gaming World of January 1997. Also Mythos Software’s now-defunct home page.

Like its predecessor, The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes: Case of the Rose Tattoo has never received a digital re-release. It is, however, supported by the ScummVM interpreter, so getting it running isn’t too much of a challenge on Windows, MacOS, or Linux once you acquire the original CD or an image of same. As of this writing, you can find several of the latter on archive.org, including one version that is already packaged up and ready to go with ScummVM. Just search for “sherlock rose tattoo”; I prefer not to link directly to avoid bringing unwanted attention to their existence from our friends in the legal trade.

And if you enjoy this type of contemplative sleuthing, you might also be interested in the Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective board games, which play like analog versions of this game — perfect for a lazy late-summer afternoon on the terrace with a tall glass of something cold and the company of a good friend or two.)

 
 

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33 Responses to The Case of the Rose Tattoo

  1. Michael Russo

    August 19, 2022 at 4:49 pm

    I read this last week when you accidentally posted it to your site and my RSS reader grabbed a copy. just figured I’d use it as an opportunity to say thanks again for writing interesting historical essays each week!

     
  2. Leo Vellés

    August 19, 2022 at 7:21 pm

    The love you shared by the two Sherlock Holmes games developed by Mythos is also shared by me. Thanks for this article. Since you mention it: what are the other games that made it to your short list of favorite point & click adventure games?

     
    • Ido Yehieli

      August 20, 2022 at 5:41 am

      There’s the hall of fame linked on the right: https://www.filfre.net/about-me/hall-of-fame

      Looking at that list you’ll find Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Day of the Tentacle, Sam and Max Hit the Road and I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.

       
      • Jimmy Maher

        August 20, 2022 at 10:51 am

        Yeah… I probably shouldn’t have teased a short list I haven’t actually made. ;) But there’s a pretty good long list there in the Hall of Fame.

         
  3. Marco

    August 19, 2022 at 7:50 pm

    I adore this game too: in fact it’s my second-favourite adventure game, after Titanic: Adventure out of Time. It’s also – according to my researching of the How Long to Beat website – the longest adventure game, taking over 30 hours. That’s five times the length of Zork: Grand Inquisitor.

    It’s worth pointing out that Conan Doyle wrote an unofficial trilogy of short stories – The Naval Treaty, The Second Stain and The Bruce-Partington Plans – that all revolve around the theft of government documents. Rose Tattoo takes that idea but turns it into a far richer and more intricate plot. There’s no other game that immerses you in historical detail to the same level – e.g. Holmes referring to a recent Act of Parliament as a euphemism for a character being gay. Playing it through, the only anachronism I found was the appearance of John Brown, who died in 1883.

    The version I found had some really annoying bugs – two points where if you don’t do exactly the right thing Wiggins will disappear and never reappear – but you tell me yours didn’t. A couple of other minor quibbles: it irritated me that the darts minigame was just repeated from Serrated Scalpel – my assumption is they were going to make it billiards but that proved too difficult? Also, while the Holmes and Watson voices are superb, there was a bit of a shortage of actors to voice the minor characters, seemingly a common problem in adventure games.

    Such a shame it didn’t get the acclaim it merited at the time, but yes, I’d recommend anyone who’s at all a Sherlock Holmes fan to play it now.

     
    • Marco

      August 22, 2022 at 2:31 pm

      Just spotted one error in the article – it should be “Kaiser Wilhelm II”…

       
      • Jimmy Maher

        August 23, 2022 at 4:07 pm

        It’s Wilhelm I. (Wilhelm II actually was a bit of a goose-stepping martinet…) But, since Wilhelm I died in 1888, situating the game in “circa 1890” wasn’t quite accurate. A better bet would be about 1885. Thanks!

         
        • Marco

          August 23, 2022 at 10:14 pm

          No, it really is Wilhelm II – the one who became Britain’s greatest enemy in 1914. The whole point is to tease the player by introducing someone who you are pretty damn sure must be a baddie, but within this game he’s actually a goodie. He’s portrayed as a young reformer, still finding his feet as he’s just come to the throne. (Wilhelm I was aged 90 when he died in 1888, so would never have been doing tours of Britain at that point.) The alternative history of what could have been if he’d stayed that way is then also teased – in the long discussion Holmes and Watson have in the endgame, they talk about how Queen Victoria’s family (i.e. her grandchildren Kaiser Wilhelm II, the future King George V and the future Tsar Nicholas II) are likely to fall out after the old queen dies, though they conclude she’ll be good for a few more years yet.

           
          • Jimmy Maher

            August 24, 2022 at 4:59 am

            Somehow that flew over my head. Edits made. Thanks so much!

             
            • Marco

              August 24, 2022 at 12:53 pm

              No worries! What adds confusion is that in the room you meet him there’s a photo of “the prince” shaking hands with Lord Palmerston (d. 1865) outside the British Museum. That’s actually referring to Prince Albert, whose old rooms they are, not to the Kaiser, but it threw me a bit on first playthrough.

               
  4. Peter Olausson

    August 19, 2022 at 9:31 pm

    This really looks like a game to my tastes. Will try!

    Spelling: Otto von Bismarck it is.

     
    • Jimmy Maher

      August 19, 2022 at 10:48 pm

      Thanks!

      Be sure to have a look at the first Lost Files game as well, if you can bear the lower-resolution graphics. The two are very much of a piece.

       
  5. Alex

    August 20, 2022 at 5:43 am

    Since I consider the first game as one of the best adventures of all time, I will definitely check this one out, thanks for the recommendation!

     
  6. Buck

    August 20, 2022 at 6:41 am

    I think “The Riddle of Master Lu” does something similar graphically. At least the screenshots reminded me of it.

     
  7. Aula

    August 20, 2022 at 7:18 am

    “the four years separating the two games’s release dates”

    games’

    “the hand-drawn scenery”

    The scenery was 3D rendered, just like in, say, Under a KIlling Moon. While UaKM allows you to move the “camera” freely in the 3D environment and this game doesn’t, you really couldn’t tell that from just looking at static screenshots; the quality of the rendering is only slightly better here. That’s actually kinda amusing; although this game was made about three years later than UaKM (which at the time meant a significant increase in computing power) and everything was rendered on the developers’ computers (which meant they could take all the time they wanted to render each scene) they still had to skimp on everything. For one obvious example, look at the tiles in the morgue; the same small tile pattern repeats over the walls (in two different color schemes for the upper and lower parts), and the arch over the exit has two identical copies of the same texture.

     
    • Jimmy Maher

      August 20, 2022 at 10:56 am

      Thanks!

       
  8. Martin

    August 20, 2022 at 11:33 pm

    “there’s nothing better than going to bed early with a Trollope”. Guess there are going to be no non-native English readers that are going to get that Harold Macmillan comment/joke.

     
    • declain

      August 21, 2022 at 7:17 am

      I’m non-native, somebody cares to explain?

       
      • Mayhaym

        August 21, 2022 at 10:24 am

        AFAIK a trollop is a woman of loose morals.

         
        • declain

          August 22, 2022 at 6:45 am

          Thanks, I get it now.

           
      • Lisa H,

        August 21, 2022 at 3:44 pm

        As Mayhaym says; so there’s a pun on Anthony Trollope’s surname.

         
    • Sebastian Redl

      February 1, 2023 at 2:24 pm

      I got it

       
  9. Carlton Little

    August 24, 2022 at 6:39 pm

    This is another favorite of mine, shame I never knew it existed before a dozen years ago! Is there any particular reason such a great and fabulously detailed game would be so little known? The first game seems to have been well marketed; everyone knew about it. Not so much, this time around…

    I’ve gone through it a few times since then but must admit, the finer details of the plot are still lost on me somewhat. This is likely because I lack the background knowledge to tie up all the loose ends. I’m a very ‘ungifted’ reader to be blunt. Some more direct or concise resources that go over the main elements of this time period, might be appreciated if you have any suggestion? I’m sure it sounds like an odd request but there it be…

     
    • Jimmy Maher

      August 24, 2022 at 7:12 pm

      For everyday life in the Victorian Age, How to Be a Victorian by Ruth Goodman is a lot of fun and very informative. For great-power politics, Barbara Tuchman’s The Proud Tower is wonderful. If you enjoy it, you can follow it with The Guns of August and The Zimmerman Telegram to complete her “World War I trilogy.”

       
  10. Ajax

    August 27, 2022 at 2:20 pm

    A couple of nitpicks: “Elliot” should be “Eliot” (one L), and “Saint James Park” should be “St James’s Park”.

    Thank you for yet another intriguing and well-written article; I really enjoy reading this blog!

     
    • Jimmy Maher

      August 27, 2022 at 5:16 pm

      Thanks!

       
  11. Robert

    August 27, 2022 at 4:13 pm

    Thanks for this article. I never played the second game but the first was certainly a favourite.

    My 2nd favourite Holmes after Jeremy Brett!

     
  12. Mike Ducnan

    August 28, 2022 at 4:42 am

    My favorite part was the juxtaposition of Watson and Holmes in the beginning. Watson’s struggle to find anything to click on that will interest Holmes,… and then you’re driving Holmes, and the same rooms are chock full of things to click on and crazy detail. It’s a great use of the adventure game medium to cement the Watson-sees-but-Holmes-observes theme.

     
  13. Jonathan O

    October 19, 2022 at 7:40 am

    I find it slightly depressing that no-one’s yet noticed this error – the composer is Cesar Franck, not Eduard.

     
    • Jimmy Maher

      October 20, 2022 at 2:27 pm

      Better late than never, right? Thanks!

       
  14. Tal Cohen

    April 21, 2023 at 8:38 am

    Bledsoe?
    That’s odd, I’ve just finished the game and Bledsoe never did show up, even though I spoke about him to Farthington early on in the game.
    Strange.

     
    • Adrian

      June 28, 2023 at 11:06 am

      I had the same problem. I was surprised to be finishing the game when I hadn’t yet met Bledsoe, or Agnes Ratchet for that matter. I went back to an earlier save game from Spitalfields and couldn’t figure out what I’d missed. I’d thought I’d locked myself out somehow but it turned out I needed to try to talk to the guard at the grocer’s again (option was dimmed as I’d done it before) to get the necessary new dialog prompts.

      The wire from Farthington to meet Bledsoe only arrived after I’d found and analyzed the original formula, which you can’t do until you’ve finished with Ratchet. There must have been some mix-up with the scripting there since Holmes makes a point of asking Bledsoe where Ratchet is – I don’t think it’s possible to talk with him without meeting her!

      I also had a problem early on while playing this through ScummVM. Any time I (as Holmes) was trying to wake up Wiggins, the game would crash. Luckily I could get around that one by taking his scarf instead.

      I loved the game, by the way. Was completely entranced. It’s caused a reassessment since usually I hate when progress in adventure games is mostly about revisiting people and exhausting all the dialogue. It turns out I don’t mind that at all when it feels this organic.

       
  15. TheSquid

    December 27, 2023 at 12:47 pm

    Apart from the fact this is a quite good adventure game with a well-written plot, what I found impressive was that for a game from this time, a number of puzzles actually had multiple solutions – or rather, some situations allowed the use of multiple similar objects.

    For example, there are a number of locations where one needs to use a needle-like object. For most of these, it’s possible to use: the hat pin from Pratt’s; the needle from the tailor’s; the golden tooth pick from the jeweler’s.

    Another example would be Mycroft’s coded message: after solving the “Apply water and heat” bit, you CAN go all the way back to Holme’s house and use the lab table (like at least one walkthrough suggests)… or you could just use the water pitcher, glass and candle which are all located in the same room you find this in…

    —-
    Additionally, it also features an inventory item which requires multiple steps, and ultimately serves no purpose, but is somewhat interesting. At the photographer’s it’s possible to borrow the small “new” portable camera. It’s also possible to grab some film and load that in. If you have the camera on you when you visit the Kaiser, you can take his photo with the camera, and he will pose and say “The Kaiser likes to be photographed”.

    When you visit the photographer later (I believe this needs to be after the incident at the aerodrome), you can give the camera back. Unfortunately the game doesn’t seem to recognise you taking the Kaiser’s photograph – instead Sherlock will say he didn’t photograph anything but replaced the film (so not sure if this changes if you don’t change the film when you first get it). However, despite this, after returning the camera the mugshot artist actually gives you a sketch of you (i.e. Holmes), which goes in your inventory, complete with a detailed description.

    All of this is completely irrelevant to the case or how it’s solved, and AFAIK there’s nothing you can do with the sketch of you apart from look at it… but it’s interesting they added this in nevertheless. I bet most people have never even noticed this is even in there…

     

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