The Transformations of Dr. Watson

This game is a brief, mostly-linear story (with occasional parallel branches) about being Watson in the Sherlock Holmes stories and having your mind shunted into different animals, each of which gets attacked in turn.

I love Sherlock Holmes stories, and have often considered Arthur Conan Doyle's writing as the most gripping and interesting to me (but only in Sherlock Holmes; his other stories aren't as interesting to me). Unfortunately, this has almost none of the interesting elements of Sherlock Holmes stories. Dr Watson is here a coroner, for some reason, and does the investigating himself. He discovers the criminal immediately (who for some reason has left the murder weapon in plain view while inviting a doctor to investigate the death and is shocked to get called out). The murderer also has no problem believing animals have sentience or malice and violently murders them and attacks children while a detective is in the house. Sherlock himself doesn't do any kind of fancy deducing of any kind. This is exactly the kind of story AI tends to generate; this story itself might not be AI, but if it is human-made, it doesn't rise above the level of what AI is capable of.

Each page has multiple ai-illustrated images, which, like the story, serve to show exactly what is described without anything greater. The text says parrot, so we see a parrot. The text says cat, so we see a cat. There isn't any deeper theme or connection or symbolism, and the details of the pictures have no relevance to the story text.

In this tale, you play as Dr. Watson, working together with our Detective Holmes to solve a mystery. While this is a choice based IF, it is more of a linear story than a mystery game. You get to make a few choices here and there, but the game largely guides you towards solving the mystery.

Watson is brought in to investigate a murder, but is quietly incapacitated during the investigation. However, during this time, his consciousness is transferred into various animals and people, allowing him to carefully puppet them and use them to nudge Holmes towards solving the mystery. It is not quite explained how Watson stumbles upon this unusual power, and while you get a few choices here, the game largely puts you on the straight path to exposing the murderer.

This is a better read if you want to read a mystery rather than actively try to solve one. Not saying it's a bad thing, of course. That said, there is one other thing I'll address.

Most of the art in the game appears to be AI. Strangely placed doorknobs, unusual buttons on clothes, strange shadows and so on. The game's description clearly declared the use of AI, and IFcomp doesn't prohibit it, so I can't really penalize it here. Another thing I'll also say is that the technology has been improving, and it has been harder and harder for me to pick out the little AI tell-tale signs these days. Still, while pictures generally could be used to add flavor to a game, I don't think it's absolutely necessary, and it can be immersion breaking when my eyes spot some out of place art because the machines haven't quite gotten it right.

Anyway, these are my thoughts as a whole.

So I know there’s a plethora of successful Sherlock Holmes games, from Infocom’s run at the great detective to those more recent 3D ones where he goes up against like Lupin or Cthulhu, but I’m not going to let that fact get in the way of my sweeping opinion: there’s no way to make a truly satisfying Holmes game, because you need to either make him too smart or too dumb. That is, either you limit the player’s agency and have him solve the case for you, because of course he’s a genius, or you subject Holmes to every one of the player’s idiotic flailings, making it a wonder he manages to tie his shoes let alone reveal the secret of the speckled band.

The way to dodge this conundrum is to have the protagonist be someone other than Holmes – typically Watson, sometimes, I am informed, a dog – and feed him information, so that once he has the data he needs he can make the great deductive leaps his fictional reputation requires. The Transformations of Dr. Watson takes this approach, putting the player in the shoes of Watson, at least initially, but forgets that this means Holmes doesn’t have to swap his deerstalker for a dunce-cap; sadly, this is the dimmest Sherlock has been since those Robert Downey Jr. movies where he mostly just got in fist-fights.

Making matters worse, the mystery here at issue would barely keep a single Hardy Boy busy for an hour. As the game opens, you as Watson are called to the house of a recently-deceased toff to pronounce him dead, though the game doesn’t exactly play things close to the chest when introducing the setup:

"His nervous smile and damp palm upon shaking hands betrayed his tension. “My father… passed away. Heart, I suppose,” he said hastily.

“'Sir Silas never complained of his heart,' the butler, Cavendish, retorted dryly, casting a quick glance at Alister. My medical intuition screamed an alarm."

The only thing that could make things more suspicious would be – well, Alister’s name oscillating to “Alistair” with no explanation, but I assume that’s just simple typos rather than further evidence of fraud. But the teacup with an oddly-bitter odor right next to the body sure does gild the lily.

In fairness, Watson doesn’t get the odor clue right away; first, his soul needs to transmigrate into the body of a cat so he can take advantage of its enhanced senses. Yes, there’s a gimmick here, and not one that was at all explained in my playthrough: after the treacherous Alister/Alistair bashes his head in with a cane, Watson’s consciousness shifts to inhabit a variety of other creatures, and he uses his newfound lease on life to draw Holmes’ attention to the clues once he arrives to check up on his missing friend.

It’s a bizarre if not unpromising gimmick, but there’s less here than meets the eye. Even once the prologue ends, the game is largely linear, with the few choices almost all having clear right and wrong answers – and again, since the mystery is so obvious, the fact that Holmes needs help at all just makes him look exceptionally slow on the uptake. At least there’s a bit of bathos to be wrung from the way the heir is able to intuit that he’s somehow managed to anger a menagerie that’s now bent on his undoing, leading him to seemingly-unmotivated reprisals that surely only incriminate him further. But unexceptional prose that’s a bit too adjective-happy combined with overly-slick AI art mean that there are few flowers to stop and sniff along the way to Holmes’ preordained triumph. It’s all laid on a bit too thick, we’re denied the conventional pleasures of a Holmes tale, and sadly neither gameplay or presentation are up to much. It’s enough to drive a man to cocaine.