“Ruined” co-creator Christian Neuhaus recently joined a podcast to talk about a different type of interactive fiction: text adventure games from the 1980s. Episode 23 of The Retro Adventurers looks at three Sherlock Holmes games: Sherlock (Melbourne House), Sherlock Holmes: Another Bow (Bantam Software), and Sherlock: The Riddle of the Crown Jewels (Infocom). https://retroadventurers.podbean.com/e/23
In Sherlock, you take a train to Leatherhead and investigate a double murder that resembles two cases from the canon. In Another Bow, you’re on an ocean voyage with an abundance of noteworthy people from 1919 and in The Riddle of the Crown Jewels, you play as Watson and traverse London in a quest to recover the stolen jewels.
The show notes include links for playing the games in a browser and links to the games’ Interactive Fiction Database pages, where user’s manuals for two of the games are available. All three IFDB pages have download links, if you have software for playing ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, and Infocom games. The user’s manual and the “lost manuscript” that accompanied Another Bow are available here: https://www.mocagh.org/loadpage.php?getgame=anotherbow
Alex
September 22, 2026 at 11:46 pm
Parser-era detective games really hit different — actually typing out your questions and chasing down hunches made you feel like a real sleuth instead of just clicking through dialogue trees. If you love that open-ended “interrogate anyone, examine everything” vibe, it’s worth checking out an AI text adventure game, which takes that same freeform spirit and runs wild with it. Great pick for an episode too, since these Holmes adventures honestly don’t get discussed nearly enough. Thanks for rounding up the browser-playable links and manuals!