Is this not a bit contrived, Frogwares? “Who cares? It’s public domain! Everything’s canon now, bitch!” You know what, I don’t get a cynical vibe from Frogwares’ milking of the IP. I assumed he just needed someone to go halfsies on the rent, but I suppose we have to crowbar new intrigues in wherever we can. That’s right, motherfuckers, it’s the new improved intentional Creepy Watson. Well, it turns out the reason why Holmes eventually shacks up with Watson is that in his youth Holmes had an imaginary friend who looked a lot like Watson and was also named Jon. And how can Holmes work without Watson, the audience needs the everyman perspective to balance out Holmes acting like an intergalactic space computer running “Socially inept cunt ME”. But wait, this is pre-Doctor Watson Sherlock Holmes. No, this is a prequel story about a young Sherlock visiting his childhood home on a Mediterranean island to get to the bottom of his mother’s mysterious death and his own blocked memories of it. What, is Sherlock Holmes an XBox, now? Hey he’s public domain, he might as well be. Fortunately the universe now rights itself with the Sinking City formula being reused for a Sherlock Holmes game, namely Sherlock Holmes Chapter one. Sinking City was just a detective game where half the witnesses look like discarded fish finger sandwiches, and that only distracted from things at best. When horror is clearly not their comfort zone the way detective games are.
Not without ambition, it seems, but when they did finally leave the paddling pool of the adventure game niche to dive into the shark-infested sewage treatment plant of open worlds, how strange that they chose to do The Sinking City first, a Lovecraft adaptation. But no game developer has buggered him with greater enthusiasm than Frogwares, churning out Holmes adventure games for decades. Sherlock Holmes is a character who’s been buggered inside and out by public domain, and as many of the works imply, that’s exactly how he likes it. You may also know that fucking Disney have been lobbying for years to extend the public domain cutoff so they can keep a death grip on their copyrights, but lately it seems like they’ve been trying to create their own version of public domain, where instead of every motherfucker on earth being allowed to mess with IP as much as they want they’re instead going to hire every motherfucker on earth to direct at least one Star Wars movie. Do you wish Tarzan was a West highland terrier? He can be, now! Do you want Captain Nemo to go into business selling children’s frozen dinners? Why not? He’s as much yours as Jules Verne’s, take that, you bearded paid-by-the-word French git.
Isn’t the public domain a wonderful thing? A certain amount of time after the original creator carks it, all IP becomes everybody’s P. We have a merch store as well! Visit the store for brand new ZP merch.
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