originally published on cohost
probaby first released onto DOS in 1991, Sherlock by Everett Kaser is this fascinatingly weird little puzzle game that seems to almost but not quite prefigure sudoku. it is cute and fun and good and will only cost you six dollars to buy Sherlock Zen, the android version which is still legit good (and doesn't have any mictotransactions or ads because the Spirit of Shareware live on even in these dark times.)
the goal is simple: each icon has a place it has to go! your job is to use the clues around the outside of the grid to whittle away possibilities until only the correct solution remains. hence the name. vertical clues at the bottom tell you about columns, so in the picture above we know that the orange is in the same column as the railroad sign! and the horizontal clues on the side tell you about rows. we know that the green guy, already placed in the grid by the game, has the letter e in a column next to him. but remember that the clue doesn't show direction! the e may be on his right or his left side! but it isn't anywhere else, including directly below him.
this game has a lot of rules, and they're hard to rememer all of them your first few times playing! the instructions even explicitly encourage you to press the hint button as a method of learning. but i don't think the game is obtuse, no information is hidden or anything. you just have to learn a bit and you'll be fine!
if you want a basically free experience, the always wonderful internet archive has a copy of the original shareware game. it only asks you to pay if you've played for a few days, and it will probably be ok to buy the android version! i haven't actually checked with everett. there's also the windows version and some of his other games!
and while we're here, let's use cohost's new editor to show a playthrough of the puzzle above! if you'd like to join me, you can play the exact same puzzle in zen sherlock, puzzle 1235.
first, some cleanup! remove those Es not by green guy, get rid of yellow houses that are not exactly two spaces apart, and the grape has two road signs next to it so they're not anywhere else.
do you see the next move? look at the vertical clues. E goes with banana! but, there are only two places E can still go, and one of them has a grape already in the fruit row! so e can't go there, and therefore...
we place the e, and place the banana along with it! (this is where i'd click on the vertical banana/e hint to hide it from view since it's no longer relevant, but i'll keep it for this example.) i also marked the only two places a five can be, thanks to placing the banana, and also did a sudoku trick: in the earlier image you can notice the three sign spaces on the lefthand side of the grid only have three possible options! that's a triple! that means that the stop sign, speed sign, and railroad signs can't be anywhere else but there, so we can remove them from any other space.
this brings us to another clue. in the vertical clues, we are told that below green guy, there is EITHER a blue house, OR a stop sign. exactly one must be true. and since we removed the stop sign thanks to sudoku...
tada! we have the blue house. unfortunately that didn't do much for us, so let's go through the clues and do more tidying up. this tidying is a bit more advanced than the first one, lots of messing around with the white house and M to get here. Also, a non-sudoku trick, kinda, that will help you with row hints of the same type: we were able to work out that the old man and therefore the pink lady must be in one of the three lefthand columns. since they must touch one another, we can deduce that one of them must be in the space in the middle left, since otherwise they wouldn't touch! therefore we can get rid of everything else there.
(and now despite the new editor cohost still only lets me embed four images at a time. rip the crimson diamond lp at least here. let's try to finish this in only four more pics.)
after a bit more cleanup, we were able to push the 1 into the right place, and a few more icons with it in its column! that also leads to the red and yellow houses finished! (the hint for the green guy and yellow house says that the S cannot go between them. the E is already there, so that bit of the hint is irrelevant for this puzzle. it often is, but don't ignore it just in case!)
placing the white house also lets us place the cherries (the no apple clue remains irrelevant), and the cherries takes one of the two possible spaces remaining for the pear! that means the pear is placed and by extension the hospital sign and by even more extension, the dead end sign. and after that, here's where we are:
it gets us all the fruit done! we were able to get rid of the apple in column one due to it no longer touching the baby, and once we placed the cherries there was nothing left in column one thanks but the orange. (i think this is a naked single?)
next we can place the railroad sign, the ochre stache (what would you call him? we removed the baby from that spot since it can't touch an apple in column five), the 4 (it has to touch stache, and the right hand column is taken), the 5 (the four displaced one of the two spots for the five), the old man, and we can also look at a new clue type: the negator. in the horizontal clues, you can see that the stop sign and cherries can never touch! (order doesn't matter here as usual.) so we can remove the stop sign from the column touching the cherries, which finishes out the sign row.
we've been slacking on the holmes row, so let's get rid of a few Hs and Ls. in fact, they've likely been done for ages! (am i as good at explaining this as simon?) that gives us the 3 and the pink house, and the home row is complete. and we'll follow that up with the face row (baby needs a 2, so it can't go above the 3!), which in turn places the 2 and by extension the 6. by the way you'll notice that there are a few tiles that never get clued! you'll often just end up working those out in the process of placing everything else, but they'll be an annoyance in the meantime. here's what the board looks like before i make the last move.
and here's what it looks like after!
told you it was DOS-era shareware! and that's the puzzle done. thank you for reading.