So far, The Awakened sounds like a standard, more or less successful, Sherlockian game. Where does Lovecraft fit into things, then? To be blunt, nowhere. H.P. Lovecraft was a prolific American writer who created a disturbing, complex and cohesive mythology centred around various races of alien beings who invaded the Earth at points in its history, some of which were so powerful that they came to be regarded by humans as monsters or gods. Unfortunately, it seems that most game designers have only heard of one of Lovecraft's stories, The Call of Cthulhu, which tells of a group of demented people trying to raise Cthulhu, a squid-like being of tremendous power currently dreaming at the bottom of the sea — again, The Awakened is no different. As matter of fact, the mock-Lovecraft elements are so weak that the group Holmes is trailing could have been worshipping Ogoun Badagris or the Flying Spaghetti Monster without requiring much change to the plot.

While the Cthulhu elements will definitely disappoint Lovecraft fans, they certainly work to give the game a "horror" edge. The Awakened does not shy away from featuring bucketloads of blood, and contains a couple of scenes definitely not for the squeamish. The game is definitely meant to be creepy, and it does that very well throughout. There's always a dead thing close at hand, with hints of foul practices, and the discrete soundtrack uses every trick in the book to make you feel uneasy. Even good old Watson, while retaining his usual role as comic relief from time to time, managed to make me jump in my seat several times — though that owes more to his erratic movement pattern that allows him to materialise in front of you when he was right behind a moment earlier than to a conscious effort on the designers' part.

The game's hybrid nature, between Holmes and Cthluhu, is reflected in its extremely varied gameplay, which makes sure it's always suited to what's going on instead of following a formula. Along with the clue-searching, analyses and quizzes I've already mentioned, The Awakened features a fair share of standard inventory puzzles (including a couple that use the game's physics engine, though you shouldn't expect anything revolutionary on that front), some logic puzzles, a handful of numerical conundrums, a treasure hunt of sorts, and even a little chase sequence, which is probably the most entertaining part of the game. There are no timed or skill-based sequences, and you can only die on a few occasions, with ample warning beforehand (be sure to save your game then!) You also play some short sections as Watson from time to time, though it doesn't really differ from what you do with Holmes.

Varied in nature, the gameplay is also very uneven in terms of difficulty and quality. One thing that never seems to get nailed right is the sense of direction. Far-too-explicit instructions combined with some forced linearity (where you can't take or use objects before having been given an explicit reason) reduce several sections to just following orders rather than having to think your way through. At other times, I often found myself at a loss as to what the game wanted me to do. Each type of challenge has its own "rules" and expectations, and the game usually does nothing to tell you what they are, often seeming to assume that they are obvious enough not to need any explanation — which they aren't. As a matter of fact, I felt some puzzles' difficulty lay more in guessing what their rules were than in solving the puzzle itself. The interface, devoid of a general "look" function, doesn't help with this lack of direction either. You sometimes activate a hotspot only to be told that Holmes expects you to use something on it, but with no clue as to why that might be necessary, or even what exactly you're looking at. And while the English translation is generally good, some blunders here and there also contribute to leaving you even more lost in the fog — one of the game's several rough edges that, while not strongly detracting from the overall experience, subtly hurt the game every now and again. That is not to say that all the gameplay in The Awakened is a chore, but for every challenge that is fun to solve there's another one that isn't.

As a matter of fact, this hit-and-miss quality is a general characteristic of the game. While some sections work rather well (especially Holmes and Watson's trip to America, which has the most lively locations, the most interesting assortment of puzzles of the game, as well as some rather nice plot developments), others should never have made it into the game. For instance, near the end, when you're very close to reaching your goal, you have to go through a long series of inventory puzzles, which are rather good in themselves, but are completely unrelated to the events at hand and manage to destroy whatever momentum the game had managed to build up to that point. But the worst part of the game was much earlier. About a fifth of the 25–30 hours you'll spend on The Awakened takes place in an asylum, and you don't know the meaning of abysmal until you've played through that. All that time spent running along grey and boring corridors which all look the same, going on a seemingly never-ending stream of fetch quests for a series of babbling and cackling patients who never manage to be anything but annoying, is enough to make you half-mad yourself. Furthermore, it seems the designers decided to open The Big Book of Clichés at the page for "asylums in horror stories" and use every single one of them (yes, including constant mad screaming, cruel experiments, and body parts stashed in a corner). Throughout this entire section, I had to force myself to persevere, as there was nothing in the game compelling me to continue.

And so we finally come to The Awakened's biggest problem. It does some things well and some things not-so-well, but its prevailing characteristic is that is offers very little incentive to go on playing. I said at the beginning that Holmes was "on the trail of a cult of Cthulhu worshippers who have kidnapped various people for use in one of their dark rituals". That wasn't a summary of the early portions of the game; that's basically all there is to the plot. When you hear the names of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and H.P. Lovecraft, one thing it is reasonable to expect is mystery — and that is precisely what this game fails to provide. It plays out in a completely predictable fashion, without a single twist or revelation, as Holmes just follows the trail of the evil cultists in order to avert the end of the world — though he could probably have stayed at 221B and waited for the game's plot to bore Cthulhu to sleep. There are some smaller mysteries along the way, but the game does a poor job at conveying their relevance in the larger picture (apart from providing the clue to the next step). And when you take it for granted that you're facing an army of bloodthirsty weirdos going on a rampage, a murder or two hardly feels surprising or interesting. At the end of the day, when the motive is known and the circumstances irrelevant, determining whether this blood splatter on the left comes from the same person as that blood spatter on the right doesn't feel worth either a backache or a headache.

Ultimately, The Awakened is not a mystery worthy of Doyle or of Lovecraft. Rather, it's something between a thriller and a horror story that doesn't do full justice to either. If this is what you're looking for, if you feel the reliance on creepy atmosphere is enough to keep you going, and if you're ready for both the hits and the misses in the design, then you should have a reasonably good time overall. Otherwise, take a pass on the game and don't worry about the missed opportunity. It was inevitable that the paths of Holmes and Cthulhu would cross one day, but it is equally certain that they'll return in more of their own games in future, having gone their separate ways again. This, too, is just bound to happen.