Sherlock Holmes vs. Jack The Ripper

This is a game that I never knew existed until I bought it. While scouring the shelves at EB Games or wherever, I was too intrigued (or capitalism-inclined) to pass up such an intriguing-sounding game for the scant twenty or thirty-odd dollar asking price. I've never been an enormous fan of Sherlock Holmes and the only thing I knew about Jack The Ripper came from From Hell but it struck me as incredibly enticing to solve one of the world's most famous unsolved mysteries as the world's most famous detective. And, by the end, that's exactly what you get.

After finishing the game and reading a little more about it, I came to appreciate it even more. As it turns out, the game is either incredibly well-researched or just well-researched enough to convince me that it's incredibly well-researched. The victims, the crime scenes, the maps, and many of the characters are real individuals who found themselves wrapped up in the whole Jack The Ripper phenomenon. Herein lies one of the game's most triumphant successes but also its biggest dilemma.

As I said before, part of the thrill of buying the game was taking on a real crime committed by a real criminal. Had I known the level of authenticity that was present in the game while I was playing it, I imagined I would have been even more enthralled with the experience. Sure, I knew that there were going to be some murders committed by someone who I was eventually going to catch but I had no idea that I would be investigating suspects who were actually held for questioning for the murders. In fact, one of my least favourite parts of the game was that there just happened to be this guy running around Whitechapel (where the crimes were committed), who happened to have a collection of uteri. I thought that he was a really bad red herring character but, as it turns out, Francis Tumblety was in Whitechapel at the time and did make a point of whipping out his genital specimens at dinner parties. We get to a problem, however, when, under this lacquer of authenticity, it comes time to say whodunit.

At present (according to Wikipedia), there are over a hundred people who are considered to possibly be Jack (or Jill) The Ripper. So, when making an accusation about the identity of the murderer, there are really two choices. The first is to just make someone up but the second is to choose one of the people who really existed around that time and put it all on them. The second theory is the one that Sherlock Holmes vs. Jack The Ripper adopts but it sits quite uncomfortably for me. Because the game puts such stock in its accuracy, its suggestion that the game's killer is, in fact, the real Jack The Ripper. It's not as though the game simply takes the real characters and shakes them up to see where they land. No, the investigation follows a similar progression to the real police work that followed the Whitechapel Murders. You even go so far as to exonerate some of the real world's suspects for the same reasons that they were released back in real 1888.

Where this becomes a problem is that I have never heard of the person who you end up discovering, in the game, is Jack The Ripper. And, now that I have heard of him, the only context that I have for his entire existence is the notion that he is a serial killer. It's not easy to say for certain but there is certainly an argument for the fact that obscurity in history is better than infamy. Rather than leaving this mentally ill man alone, his name is being brought up 130 years later for the sake of being accused of being one of the most reviled figures in English history. Now, I'm not saying that the person accused in this game is not Jack The Ripper. It's about as possible that he is as it is for it to be anyone else. It just seems irresponsible to drag someone's name so thoroughly through the mud for the sake of adding just that much more authenticity to the game. This was a real person, whose last years were spent in an asylum, whose, thanks to this game (and other theorists) lasting legacy is being accused of a murder. Now, because of this game and its remarkably structure, I think he did it, even though he probably didn't. While the game certainly does have its problems, you're convinced by the end that you have the real suspect, that you've ended his reign of terror, when instead, all you've done is associated a real figure to a real crime because of fictional connections that have been sprinkled with truth. If it wasn't intended as entertainment, I would say it was evil.