Crushed In Time A detective case that bends reality

Forget clicking. Here you grab things, pull them, twist them and let go, and the world snaps back like rubber. A statue turns when you wrench it, a bell rings when you yank the rope, and half the fun is finding out what reacts at all. The whole adventure runs on this one elastic idea, and it keeps finding new uses for it right up to the end. There is a hint system when you get stuck, though it does not always point the way: some puzzles want trial and error, and a few ask for quick timing. Patient hands get the most out of it.

A new Sherlock Holmes game has just launched, and one of its characters has gone missing. The investigation drags Holmes and Watson, famously inept and endearingly so, through the very stages of their own game's creation, from early prototypes to the finished product. It is a meta story of time travel that never takes itself too seriously, told with a cast of new characters alongside the bickering duo, and dialogue recorded by actual human voices. The humor is the point: silly, self-aware and generous with surprises. The art is bright and cartoony, and it looks gorgeous.

This is detective work with the volume turned up. You examine strange scenes, poke at everything that looks even slightly suspicious, and piece together what happened to the missing character across a story that keeps twisting. The puzzles are the deduction: each screen holds a handful of interactive points, and figuring out which ones matter, and in what order, is how the case moves forward. Some solutions are genuinely inventive. Others take a few wrong turns before they click, which suits anyone who likes poking at a mystery at their own unhurried pace.