Today’s screenshots show that Crimes & Punishments definitely marks the biggest step ever made by the Sherlock Holmes games. Giving up our homemade engine in favor of Epic’s Unreal Engine 3, the game will benefit from richer, more immersive and detailed visuals, for both environments and characters.

However, this new engine not only benefits the game’s graphics, and it also allows the development of new investigation mechanics: in total, the game offers 14 gameplay mechanics that we will be pleased to present in more detail through screenshots and videos in the coming months. From the beginning of each of the 8 cases of the game, to the arrest of culprits and the moral choices that will be presented to the players, these new mechanics give the feeling that we ARE Sherlock Holmes, and enable them to fully use the incredible talents and gifts known to all fans, such as his skill to guess many details about someone’s life simply by glancing at them – or to imagine and reconstruct the course of event by carefully observing all the key details of a crime scene.

The Queen of Vampires is back! Dracula: Love Kills, the casual sequel to the gothic adventure game Dracula: Origin, and Most Exciting Game of 2011, is now available for iPad. Waterlily Games Studio is extremely excited to bring this terrifying Hidden Object Puzzle Adventure game to iPad players:

• Creepy but one of the most beautiful gameplay
• Over 40 locations to explore
• Hard and easy mode of difficulty: additional or limited help and hints, quick or slow hint recharge, easy or hard puzzles
• Possibility to influence the gameplay and choose your own game ending!

As well as

• “Lore” books for the characters and legends featured in the game
• 15 in-game achievements
• Re-playable minigames and hidden object scenes
• Vamp-tastic videos
• Bonus Chapter
• Exclusive Wallpapers
• Integrated Strategy Guide

The Queen of Vampires is back and is determined to destroy the world! No one, human or vampire, will stand in her way. Count Dracula is still weak from his last battle with Van Helsing, so an uneasy alliance is formed between the two mortal enemies. Will they overcome their hatred and stop the Queen? Grab the game for free now in iTunes and unlock the full Adventure from within the game!

In the near future, in 2050, a handful of young and brilliant citizens have been chosen by Gruckezber Corporation to join the Magtech training program for space exploration. Equipped with a special glove using Gruckezberg’s technology, the candidates have to solve their way through a maze of challenge rooms that get more and more challenging, by magnetically charging objects in the level that will attract or repel each other. But when an earthquake disrupts the training program, what seemed to be the chance of a lifetime for the candidates will soon become a descent into folly and cosmic horror! In this video, plunge with Dax, the hero of the game, into a future where Technology confronts the Cthulhu Mythos!

Magrunner: Dark Pulse will be released on PC, Xbox LIVE® and PlayStation®Network.

The detailed analyses of the new game environments is available at the Devblog:

This new update is an opening sequence of blog posts all associated with the game engine change.  Olga Ryzhko and Sergey Chervonnyi, Frogwares studio, address the question of the game engine from several perspectives: environments, characters, platforms, animation and interface. Continue the read here.

You can choose to play the game in English, German, French and Russian with full audio support; while subtitles are available in Italian, Spanish, Polish and Korean.

Later on we plan to complete Games page adding details about entire Frogwares catalog including the latest Sherlock Holmes Mystery of the Frozen City for Nintendo 3DS.

We have also launched the DevBlog for Magrunner: Dark Pulse devblog.magrunner-thegame.com First updates in the blog are coming shortly! If interested, we are now finishing voice-over to launch the closed beta for the game backers.

For those of you who missed it on April 1, here is a short in-game video of Sherlock Holmes Crimes and Punishments announcing the return of Creepy Watson:

Every single member of Frogwares studio is thrilled by the enthusiasm and support that you showed a month ago when we officially announced the new Sherlock Holmes game. We were delighted to announce that the new Frogwares game would get a significant makeover both in terms of technology used and game philosophy: we do not want you to watch the world’s most famous detective anymore; we want you to be the detective. To make you really feel the game we have released Developer Blog, a diary to keep track of game development and all Frogwares things. We are going to provide you with regular commentaries, descriptions of events, and other internal materials related to the game.

The DevBlog will keep you updated on all the milestones of game development. You will meet game characters and the team working on them; we will address some of the questions you may have and will share the artwork, our sketches and concepts, so on and so force. If you have any suggestions on what you want to see here, you are warmly welcome to share!

The DevBlog is run by Olga Ryzhko, Frogwares Business Development Manager, (the author of these words actually) with some occasional entries that would be written by the team. Blog introduction speaks of the main focus of the game, i.e. Investigation and Deduction:
Crimes and Punishments can be described as a detective-mystery game with the main focus set on INVESTIGATION and DEDUCTION. It is purely based on your logic and deductive reasoning as the central game mechanic.

You will have a set of different elements and various mechanics that will help with your investigation ensuring that you detect the truth correctly. You will have hints if stuck, a chemical laboratory to analyze pieces of rope, cigar ashes and others clues, as well as a deduction board to bring all the pieces together.  Your careful examination will draw you through the chains of inferences, which will lead you to a logically certain conclusion.

We introduced this mechanic of the deduction board in Sherlock Holmes vs Jack the Ripper back in 2009. We also used it The Testament of Sherlock Holmes in 2012, showing that only a valid deduction gives you the ability to move further during the game, while ensuring the truth of your conclusion.

Crimes and Punishments presents another philosophy. You will solve the case and we will give you the reasons to believe your conclusion from the premise; but the truth of the conclusion is not guaranteed this time!

Visit Sherlock Holmes: Crimes & Punishments Developer Blog at devblog.sherlockholmes-thegame.com

The new Sherlock Holmes game, Crimes and Punishments will build upon that success with important changes on the graphical side as well as the game experience side.
For the first time ever, Frogwares Studio will abandon its homemade graphics engine. The latest adventures of Sherlock Holmes will be developed on Epic’s Unreal Engine 3, allowing the series to jump far ahead of previous installments in graphical quality. Environments will be more realistic and finely detailed with dynamic lighting and shadows. Choosing this engine also lets the game benefit from many technologies like a powerful animation engine for smooth movement and animation transitions, real-time shaders and a particle system, and advanced post-processing effects.

Unlike the previous adventures of Sherlock Holmes, in Crimes and Punishments you will not be a mere spectator during the detective’s investigation. It is now your turn to truly become Sherlock Holmes and lead your own investigation–actually, your investigations, as 8 captivating cases await you! Murders, disappearances, spectacular thefts, and other investigations will bring you to the cutting edge of the detective genre and these cases will be the bread and butter of this game, written in the pure tradition of Conan Doyle’s novels. Each case offers real freedom to players, who will have to make important moral choices instead of simply enforcing justice by the book. All decisions have an influence in the game and affect your character’s reputation in addition to having realistic, sometimes unexpected, consequences. You will have to bear the weight of your choices, as Crimes and Punishments offers an exciting system of actions/consequences that forces players to think before acting by giving true depth to every decision they make.

In Crimes and Punishments, players will embody a Sherlock Holmes with a brand new look. We have abandoned the classic Sherlock Holmes inspired by the 60s Sherlock movies, replacing him with a more modern character perfectly matching the new artistic ambitions of the title.

Today, we are pleased to reveal more about Magrunner through 6 screenshots and an exclusive piece of art. The game’s story begins in 2050 and takes place in a big sports competition broadcast through the entire world, intended to promote a new technology based on magnetism.

The 8 participants’ objective is to finish first in a huge race made up of many challenge rooms, each one bigger and more complex than the last. Each of them has a special glove that interacts with the new magnetic technology and enables them to journey through more and more spectacular rooms by charging various objects and elements of the environment with magnetic forces that attract or repel other objects.

However, the competition soon turns into a real nightmare. A power outage and what feels like an earthquake isolates the competitors from the rest of the world. Their only hope is to finish the course and attempt to contact the exterior world. But the challenge rooms that separate them from the finish grow more and more menacing and a long descent into hell awaits them. At the end of the tunnel lies a frightening secret that could threaten all of humanity. Today’s screenshots show all this, from the modern and sleek-looking challenge rooms at the beginning to the darker and more troubling areas that follow.

Frogwares and Waterlily Games studios are happy to announce the release date for Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened for iPad. It is now officially confirmed that the game will be released at iTunes on February 04, 2013! The date may vary depending on the territories though.

The most famous detective Sherlock Holmes and his stalwart partner Doctor Watson will battle against the Dread Chtulhu! Smart puzzles and sophisticated story are also enhanced with:

-          1^st and 3^rd person camera views

-          Intuitive tutorial

-          Advanced hint system

-          Remarkable achievements

-          Help and Skip buttons for puzzles

-          Build-in walkthrough

Travel the world and investigate the wicked plans of Chtulhu cultists!