"Because I could not stop for Death, he kindly stopped for me; the Carriage held but just ourselves, and Immortality."
—Professor James Moriarty
A collection of cases with overarching plot threads, The Devil's Daughter portrays a Sherlock Holmes struggling with how to raise the young daughter of a renowned adversary without telling her of her family ties, that adversary being Moriarty. It is not the first Sherlock game brought to the Switch by Ukranian developer Frogware. On a storytelling level, this is far stronger than Crime and Punishment. Sherlock grapples with adoptive parenting when he is not exactly prepared for the challenge, all while playing cat and mouse with his new neighbor Alice—whom he finds has an enigmatic but dark interest in his life.
Production Values
As with other Frogware games on the platform, The Devil's Daughter is far from the pinnacle of the Switch's capabilities. Underpowered as it may be, the system has its share of visually excellent first-party games, which I have highlighted over and over as successful in utilizing the strengths of the Switch. Items that appear abruptly based on walking distance, blurry textures, and noticeable pixelation all mar the production values of The Devil's Daughter significantly. That said, some moments, as seen in the close-up of Sherlock's facial animation from the opening of the game two screenshots above, do feature much greater, more realistic levels of detail. This is aside from the sometimes long loading times, however clever it is to load a new area by having Sherlock ride a horse-drawn carriage with the opportunity to review his notebook or engage in "deductions" (as I will of course address more thoroughly, Sherlock is not rationalistic and thus is unintelligent!). As for the voice acting, I encountered no glitches or deviations from the overall strong quality.
Gameplay
Across the five cases in this title, various gameplay mechanics are introduced, some of which appear sparingly. A recurring one involves the player examining magnified outward features of a person's body or clothing and choosing which of two possibilities seems the most probable reason for the mark or characteristic (they are not the only logically possible things, though). Alternatively, the player can see what happens even if they select a descriptive option that appears wrong in light of some other evidence, though little to nothing truly follows logically from these physical qualities except that certain things are probably true about the person. Sherlock, much like the typical person (a non-rationalist), makes a plethora of assumptions, so it is not that the player has to be truly rational to be persuaded to choose the options the game presents as correct.
Puzzles are skippable: due to impatience, lack of time, or difficulty with analyzing the clues, a player can bypass entire sequences of the game. Sometimes, the puzzle-related tasks entail noticing physical factors about someone's appearance or attire as mentioned in an attempt to uncover something connected to a murder attempt, among other things. Other times, you have to determine which order a series of precise events occurred in; this also happens more than once. The non-recurring puzzles include arranging gears adequately to trigger a mechanism, navigating through a trap-laden pyramid (more on this later), and toggling between perceptions of a room as recollected and in its current state to note items that have been removed. Quick-time events and dialogue choices account for other parts of the gameplay. Various developments, which sometimes hinge on the puzzles, bring Sherlock to clues that can in turn be linked on the deduction screen.
The "deduction" screen is about identifying which miscellaneous clues are relevant to each other and then selecting certain conclusions that allegedly follow from them; the erroneous part is that sometimes trial and error rather than true rationalistic thought (that is, in accordance with the objective, intrinsically true laws of logic that thus transcend the mind) can or has to be relied on, and many of Sherlock's conclusions in the story are in reality nothing but non sequiturs that, because they are not necessary truths, cannot possibly be absolutely certain. They do not follow from some other fact or concept, and the ideas they supposedly follow from are themselves not even necessarily logically demonstrable truths. Regardless, the clues and conclusions are displayed as if to stand in for neurons and synapses. The color blue is assigned here to the representation of compatible ideas and the color red to the representation of incompatible ideas. Now, a thought is not a neuron and neither is the same as logical necessities, but I digress.
Story
The famed Sherlock Holmes acts as the adoptive parent of young Kate, who has not been told the identity of her actual father, though his assistant Dr. Watson insists that Holmes disclose this sooner rather than later. Living with Watson on Baker Street, he finds himself becoming familiar with a new neighbor, a woman named Alice. She shows a persistent interest in bonding with Kate, who becomes enamored with Alice's stories and willingness to share her time. But, as Sherlock works on various cases, evidence mounts that Alice has intentionally secured residence next to his and has some sort of very particular goal involving him. She even seems to think she can communicate with the spirits of the dead.
Intellectual Content
I will say it again. Sherlock is not genuinely rationalistic and so is not truly intelligent. In one of the cases, Sherlock mentally explores an imagined version of a pyramid from Guatemala so as to relive the experiences of someone embroiled in the case from over a decade ago, as if this would in any way show him what really happened in the pyramid! He is only thinking about one possible way the situation looked and unfolded and still bases major conclusions on what he sees in his mind. Elsewhere in the story, Sherlock just assumes prison sentences are just. He also concludes that a boy can read maps because he has one on hand, when it does not logically follow from the child having a map of London in his pocket that he knows how to read maps.
When he finds that Alice has written down Kate's birthday, he exclaims that "women are good at this sort of thing" when any thorough rationalist knows that gender is objectively unrelated to psychological traits like a precise memory for birthdays. Another time, he mentions in a threatening manner that a pygmy who kills an Englishman will not be treated lightly by the court—though, of course, it is idiotic to assume that the punishment of incarceration is morally correct anyway. But on top of all his other fallacies here, he mentions a culturally-ingrained discrimination against foreigners without acknowledging the logical errors of the philosophy behind this discrimination. What a fool!
Then there is the general conflation of logic with science, careful observaton, and historical information, or at least the absence of any clarification that logic itself is not a mental process, the laws of physics, and so on. Only a true rationalist is intelligent or worthy of deep admiration, even if he or she has little to no familiarity with the empirical trends or social constructs that Holmes really relies on, which can be relevant to cases like the game's but which one must either be omniscient to know and is always metaphysically secondary to logic itself. While The Devil's Daughter does not even hint at such ultimate, abstract truths directly, it does actually somewhat explore the topic of spiritualism. Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the original written works featuring Sherlock Holmes, was in fact (as far as historical hearsay evidence suggests) a strong philosophical proponent of spiritualism, so it is in a sense fitting for the game to weave a spiritualist character into the plot.
Is Alice really communing with spirits of the dead as parts of the game tease? Such a thing is not logically impossible, since an unembodied conscious existence after the death of the body does not contradict logical axioms. Sherlock winds up holding that she is merely insane and declares as much to Kate in the final case. Either way, Alice's characterization and Sherlock's interactions with her allow for some excellently-realized tension and twists. Biblically, she would deserve to die either way, not because she indulges in sorcery or adjacent sins (or attempts/stages them) and happens to be a woman, as some misunderstand Exodus 22:18 to mean about sorceresses; the verse says no such thing despite only mentioning female practitioners of magic and would contradict what reason requires about egalitarian consistency if it did. Also, Leviticus 20:27 and Deuteronomy 18:9-13 are not subtle about encompassing both men and women who practice the likes of necromancy, sorcery, and divination. I touch on this here because the idea that the Old Testament discriminates against women who practice such sins or are alleged to is commonly put forth.
Conclusion
The absolute greatest blunder of the game is not even an artistic one, but the misrepresentation of the supreme and absolutely certain nature of logic (its purely self-necessary truth, how anything consistent with logical axioms is hypothetically possible no matter someone's confusion or biases, etc.)—as almost all Sherlock-related media does in one way or another. But what it does handle better tends to be executed well, the momentum towards the climactic confrontation between Sherlock and Alice and the weight of Kate's connection to Professor Moriarty being two of the very best pillars. My personal favorite layer of the game is the plot threads dealing with whether or not Alice is communicating with the dead.
The mishandling of what is and is not strictly logical truth aside, should you be interested in a game based largely on investigative mechanics, this title is a great option, and the ability to skip puzzles streamlines the length and difficulty for anyone who gets stuck or does not have the time to assess an object or situation as long as they might otherwise want to. This latter option does make the game much more accessible than many offerings in this genre probably tend to be. The Devil's Daughter thus strikes a unique blend of accessibility with nuanced puzzles as it does so with its amalgam of (sometimes irrationalistically presented) detective mechanics and a necromancy story.
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