A nice escape room, with some solid puzzles and an interesting story.

Art Direction: I like the chibi style of the characters, but I find the overall visual style a bit all over the place. You have pixel art, but you also have pictures, there are too many different fonts, and the UI feels like a placeholder.

Controls/UI: pretty solid and easy to play. UI could use some work to be more clear and coherent with the rest of the game.

Audio: both music and sound design help in setting the mood.

Game Loop: game loop is solid and fun. Puzzles are engaging and tease the player's brain. I love the punishment for trying to guess a puzzle solution, or when checking something you shouldn't have. The hint system is nice, and the dialogues with Moriarty are engaging.

Overall I've really enjoyed it, but I think the visual style could use some improvements to make everything tie up together nicely.

Got to play this one on stream tonight! Overall pretty fun! I'm definitely an escape room nerd, so I loved getting to go around and look for all the clues and how they fit in with the story. Lots of red herrings in the large room, and I think it was a bit rough punishing my curiosity for trying to check every little thing, but overall a good time! Would love to see some updates to the UI as far as being able to choose windowed options, text speed (especially at the beginning), and volume, maybe a little more explanation on combining things, as I got all the notes but wasn't able to combine them-but overall a great start and I'm excited for more!

Being a fan of Zero Escape, I really had fun with the demo. The first room itself wasn't so difficult; however, I felt the size of the room was a little bit big, and I think implementing a point-and-click system on the objects in the room in addition to moving the character there and clicking it might be a good idea. Regardless, the clues in the room were helpful and fun to discover.

However, there was one part of the demo which I got stuck on- not because the puzzle was hard- but because there was a bug (no pun intended) when I tried checking the vents. For some reason, when I clicked on the vent that was supposed to have the key, there was no response, which made me unable to receive the key. It was only after I checked your walkthrough that I found it to be a bug. I didn't know what order of events lead to it, but once I switched up the order of clicking on the objects I finally was able to bypass the bug. Just letting you know.

Edit: Apparently once you click on the vent but instead of examining it you leave, you couldn't click on the vent anymore. That was how the bug happened.

I never get to do escape rooms, so working the logic in this was amazing. That said, I think the controls for keyboard could use a tweak. Currently, the controls are to use arrows for movement, Z for confirm and X for cancel. But then for accessing your inventory and doing the puzzle, it's control and shift. I think a better option would be to use A and S to access these. The usage won't feel as awkward as shift and control  do.

hey i enjoyed this a lot! very fun escape room style game. hope we see lots more games like this now that Sherlock is public domain!

the first room was a good level of difficulty to not be boring but also not be too frustrating. there were some moments where i felt the tone shift was pretty jarring (don’t want to spoil or anything but it was surprising that Sherlock didn’t have at least a quip or anything about the thing the level is named after). but that’s also kinda the style of escape room games so that’s cool.

i felt a little sad about getting punished for exploring (since i have to explore everything to beat the game). with the spider in the vent i didn’t mind it because it was funny so it’s worth it for the joke, but i was annoyed when i inspected the clock and the game just goes: “it’s a clock, that’s kinda related to time, you lose time.” (actually if it said that, that would be kinda funny too.)

all the little easter eggs and set pieces and things were really fun! they add a lot of character to the game. even though it took a lot of my time remaining the wheelchair scene was so good!!

the other thing is i feel like the UI could use some work, navigating the UI and inspecting items was tough, it was never clear when i needed to use mouse vs. keyboard. and the clue inspection thing as well, it was a little frustrating seeing the three notes, understanding exactly what i was supposed to do with them, but not being able to because i could only have one note up at a time. (i thought about taking a picture with my phone but it wasn’t nearby and i didn’t feel like getting up!)

overall though this was really fun! i’ve been playing 999 lately so my bar for escape room games is pretty high right now, and i definitely enjoyed this. with a better UI i’d probably buy it on android as well. nice game, thanks for making it~