Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened

You'd Think There was no possible way a developer could fail to produce the goods here, given the two classic inspirations of Sherlock Holmes and HP Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos, but Frogwares did just that.

Despite the presence of a grotesque black slug crawling out of a sacrificed corpse, The Awakened barely manages to keep its own audience awake, let alone the creatures within it. Perhaps the worst thing is the voice acting, which veers into ludicrous comical cockney territory, and a London which is, as it always is in Frogwares' Holmes games, jarringly devoid of inhabitants.

There's one good thing this game gave us though, and that's the mysterious teleporting Watson, who shadows your every move like a tweed-wearing stalker.

After this came Nemesis, where you had to track down French master thief Arsene Lupin, and then Jack the Ripper (in Sherlock Holmes versus...). While Holmes managed to defeat all these formidable opponents, he still hasn't cracked his most difficult case, how to make a good game that doesn't bore the arse off everyone playing it. After plenty of attempts, one suspects now that Frogwares just aren't capable of solving this particular conundrum.