Ukrainian developer Frogwares has revealed their new game, previously teased as "Project Palianytsia," will be a full remake and substantial rewrite of their 2006 release Sherlock Holmes The Awakened.
The Awakened is a dark, HP Lovecraft-inspired story infused with the narrative arc of a young Sherlock Holmes taking on his first big case once he settled in London, alongside his newly acquainted sidekick, John Watson.
What seems like a straightforward case of a missing person quickly spirals into a web of conspiracies by a nefarious cult that worships the eldritch god Cthulhu and are attempting to bring about an ancient prophecy. The game will take the detective duo across 4 locations – Victorian London, a Swiss psych ward, the New Orleans bayous, and the Scottish Highlands - as they try to separate reality from the supernatural while trying to put a stop to these shadowy madmen.
According to the Frogwares team, no assets or code are being repurposed from the original game. "We are essentially rebuilding the entire game from scratch to run Unreal Engine 4, using all new assets or ones we can cleverly rework from Sherlock Holmes Chapter One which came out only a few months ago," says Jaroslav Martyniuk, Feature Designers Team Lead at Frogwares. "We’re also adding entirely new gameplay mechanics while reworking the original ones to expand the ways players will be solving the cases. The changes to the story and timeline mean entirely new voice acting will be recorded. We’re also reworking the camera to feel like modern third-person perspective games, remaking all of the UI, animations, cutscenes. The list goes on. It’s essentially an entirely new game with only the underlying story in the cases staying more or less intact"
The Awakened will be coming to PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S and Nintendo Switch, with a Kickstarter campaign set to launch soon to help secure the game's final production funds and offer fans a few more bonuses and rewards for supporting the studio at a time when their country is at war.
The first official trailer, a video update from the team, and more details about gameplay mechanics will be released alongside the start of the Kickstarter campaign. For now, the team are sharing the first screenshots (seen below) and are asking fans to opt into observing the Kickstarter campaign to be notified once it goes live.
