We have before us a most mysterious case of a game gone missing. Due to launch in North America on Friday, June 10, Sherlock Holmes: The Devil's Daughter has proven a no show. We don't want to jump to conclusions, but we suspect some sort of foul play is afoot.
Let's take a look at the evidence as it has been presented to us. As Mr. Gameinformer has pointed out, the North American launch for Sherlock Holmes: The Devil's Daughter was scheduled to take place heading into this very weekend. It was set for a June 10 launch, the same as its intended launch in Europe.
As it turns out, Sherlock Holmes: The Devil's Daughter is currently available overseas across all platforms, including the PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. Here in the States, however, it has only arrived for PC via Steam.
According to Bigben Interactive, the studio responsible for the game announced last week that the US version of The Devil's Daughter had been delayed until sometime later in the summer. Mysteriously, nobody seems to have received that memo and, more importantly, despite the planned delay, the game still launched on PC as originally planned.
You might be thinking this is just a mishap, that the PC version of The Devil's Daughter launched on Steam because someone forgot to adjust the launch timing for that particular platform. The console versions of the game will arrive on PS4 and Xbox One later this summer, so there's no real problem here, you might say.
But if you said that, you would be wrong.
I ask you to take a closer look at Mr. Gabe Newell, the co-founder and managing director of Valve, the company responsible for the Steam gaming platform. He appears completely normal at first glance but, upon further inspection, you'll notice a small smudge on his left shoe. That smudge is clearly charcoal, the very kind used in the mill where the PS4 and Xbox One versions of The Devil's Daughter were being stored.
On my way to this investigation, I dropped by the mill to check in on the console versions of the game and found that, not only had there been a break-in, but that the copies of the game had gone missing.
It will be difficult to prove without a body, but I believe that Mr. Newell is guilty of murdering The Devil's Daughter on consoles in order to boost sales of his own version of the game.
That's highly more probable than a simple mistake taking place and the game popping up on consoles later this summer, as Bigben Interactive is reporting.
Given the timing, you can't really blame them. As of tomorrow, all eyes will be trained on Los Angeles for E3 2016. Launching a game just two days before that particular circus is probably a bad idea, which we're guessing had at least something to do with the delay.
