No review of "Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened" would be complete without mentioning its circumstances. Caught in the chaos of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, developer Frogwares decided to crowdfund a project that could be accomplished quickly amid periodic power outages, Internet outages, and more serious disruption (opens in new tab).

What is surprising is that the resulting game, despite its rapid and arduous development, seems untroubled. Far from being a rehash of the original, Sherlock Holmes: Awakening feels like a careful, sophisticated, and complete reimagining. The result is an impressive, modern detective game that will feel fresh to longtime fans, but does not require nostalgia or knowledge of the original to enjoy.

It also helps that it's a killer premise, with iconic detective Sherlock Holmes taking on the oddities of the Lovecraft mythos. A man who never stops investigating and always finds a rational explanation encounters a world where the more he investigates, the stranger and more horrifying the answers become, and the total lack of rationality continues to drive him crazy. The result is not only a spark and a compelling story, but also an interesting look into Sherlock's own psyche.

The game begins on a London street corner with a cheekily mundane mystery of who stole Sherlock's morning paper and evolves into a grand conspiracy of eldritch cults, profane rituals, and betentacled gods, sending Watson and Holmes on an epic journey. Unlike the studio's previous film, "Sherlock Holmes Chapter One," this is a linear adventure rather than an open world, but there is plenty of variety, from an eerie Swiss asylum to the sunny streets of New Orleans to a crocodile-infested swamp.

Every location is a beautiful diorama, each with its own riddle to solve. As Sherlock, or sometimes Watson, your job is to collect clues and eventually connect them to draw a conclusion so that you can move on. Although probably chosen to save time and resources, it works to the game's advantage because it is an excellent riddle-solving mechanism.

Clues are recorded in a casebook and can be referenced. For example, if you find a likeness of a person's face, you can ask witnesses if they recognize the person, or check the archives to see if they recognize the person.

As the case progresses, questions can be clarified and related clues can be connected to answer the questions. If we connect the description of the "how did the victim die?" victim's wounds with the nearby candlestick, we may be able to take a step toward finding out if the butler is the murderer. One could also visually reconstruct the scene, placing ghostly representations in the space to reenact past events or to interrogate, profile, and accuse the suspect.

The whole thing is simple but elegant. The process of examining crime scenes, deciphering evidence, and ultimately figuring out the connections between people, objects, and places is wonderfully balanced, making you feel like you're doing real detective work instead of floundering when you haven't found the right connections yet. As ever, Sherlock is the perfect avatar for this kind of work. Because he is the man who can find any clue believably and can call upon and explain any knowledge. He does the hard work of figuring out what is important and what it means, and you get the pleasure of putting the puzzle together and feeling like a genius the whole time.

If there is a downside, it is that it is easily brute-forced. If you get a little lazy, you can often just keep putting the wrong answers together until you find the right one by process of elimination. The flip side of this, however, is that it is difficult to get stuck, which is one of the best parts of the detective game. Aside from a few tricky puzzles, "Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened" always keeps things moving along gently, maintaining a slow but considered pace that never feels rigid.

It's also a pleasant surprise how simply focused the game is on the core experience; Frogwares' previous games have tried to weave in action scenes and combat to create a blockbuster feel, with generally poor results, and the original 2008 version of "The Awakened" was filled with long, awkward puzzles to accomplish simple tasks. There is little of that in this title, and it is welcome that the game stays true to what it does best. [For example, "How do I get past this guard?" is treated like a riddle, solved by combining unlikely items. Such scenes work well enough to advance the plot without disrupting the flow of play, but they are less satisfying than a simple dissection of a crime scene.

The emphasis on clue-hunting and puzzle-solving fits well with the Lovecraftian narrative; The Awakened is the rare game that uses mythology as a source of subtle tension and atmosphere rather than an excuse for tentacles to pop out of everything. The hallucinatory sequences of solving arcane puzzles in a strange void miss the mark by shining too much light on the weirdness, but the rest of the game is excellent and has a creeping sense of dread. Instead of cosmic monsters crawling out of portals, human evil is always at the forefront, which makes the game all the more unsettling.

Frogwares always seemed to me to have a particular enjoyment of the gruesome and occult. Even the more straightforward Sherlock games revel in moments of eeriness and strange happenings; in The Awakened, you can see the developer's eyes light up whenever he discovers a grim new scene, and that enthusiasm is evident in every creative moment.

However, there is enough restraint in the discoveries thrown at Sherlock's goings-on that it remains ambiguous whether there are truly supernatural forces at work. Holmes's own diminished sanity and the fact that the cult specializes in mind-altering substances are convincing enough to allow players to draw their own conclusions during the game's surreal moments.

"Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened Detective" is an impressive detective game by any measure. Considering that the game was developed in an active conflict zone, it is a small miracle. Cleverly designed, atmospheric, and polished, the only sign of compromise under the circumstances is its short length. Perhaps more importantly, compared to its $40 launch price, some people will find it lacking. It's hard to ignore the fact that for the same price you can play more than twice that in Chapter 1, and the fact that all of the game's side quests must be purchased separately as DLC leaves a bitter taste in the mouth.

But if you are willing to give financial support to developers who are fighting to keep doing what they want to do under impossible circumstances, you will get the best thing Frogwares has ever done. The opening message from the team explains that The Awakened is "an act of our own recovery from the chaos and horror that the enemy has tried to impose on our lives. This staid Victorian detective story could not be a more fitting form of defiance, but its confident craftsmanship speaks to the extraordinary fortitude of its developers.