This is an interactive murder mystery, apparently. In actual fact it's more of an interactive storybook, in which the story of Sherlock Holmes' most famous case is broken down into small chunks. It's based on an idea for presenting a murder mystery developed by a book publisher a number of years ago. You are given the book as a kind of crime file and you are encouraged to read it through event-by-event and try to develop your own idea of the solution.

On CD, this means you must navigate your way through huge wodges of on-screen text and look at the odd digitised photograph. It's a terrible way of reading a book and it does not add any real element of interactive enjoyment. On top of which, the presentation is dire apart from the employing of a professional narrator. Buy the book.

This offering aims to present the Conan Doyle classic using a form of presentation pioneered by books in the Fifties: take the book apart and let the reader reassemble it by reading appropriate parts and by following clues. The end result fails almost utterly. It becomes a book which you must read as reams of on-screen text. The tale is not made any more intriguing by the fact that it is split into pieces and read to you by a hi-fi sound narrator. It really is a load of rubbish and completely misses the potential of CD as a vehicle for interactive entertainment.

Dieses Anklick-Adventure à la Sherlock Holmes kommt aus dem gleichen Stall wie "Psycho Killer" - und das merkt man auch. Hier gibt's nämlich ganz ähnliche Digibilder zu bewundern, nur daß sie (abgesehen vom Intro) nicht animiert sind. Damit ist aber auch der Reiz futsch: ödes Herumgeklicke auf allerlei Briefen, Fotos oder sonstigen Hinweisen auf den Täter führt einerseits zu einer genaueren (z.B. vergrößerten) Darstellung des Beweismaterials, andererseits zu einem unbezähmbaren Gähnbedürfnis des Bildschirm-Detektives.

Für eine Schlaftablette mit grobkörnigen Bildern und Sprachausgabe braucht es eigentlich kein CDTV, oder?