The Beekeeper’s Picnic review

• Reviews by Johnny Nys
• Published:

Light but cozy Sherlock Holmes adventure is strictly elementary but abuzz with gentle humor and charm

After witnessing a shooting incident during his last case, Sherlock Holmes decides to retire to the seaside town of Fulworth, where he can relax and raise bees. Eighteen years later, the Great War has changed the world considerably. After completing his medic duties at the front, Watson has finally returned to join his old friend once more. Elated by this reunion, Holmes decides to treat his companion to a picnic. Several conundrums, however, force him to dust off his powers of deduction first. In The Beekeeper’s Picnic, a short, classic-styled point-and-click adventure from solo developer Afoot Games, you will need to look for clues by examining items and other characters, piece those clues together in Holmes’s mind, and solve these simple cases through easy inventory puzzles and dialogue. You won’t have to solve murders or other serious crimes here. Instead it’s more Sherlock-lite, possessing a certain old-school charm. It’s not without its flaws, but it’s a pleasantly enjoyable experience for any adventure game fan, and a good title to introduce newcomers to the genre.

The Beekeeper’s Picnic is primarily depicted in traditional third-person pixel art, but it also includes beautifully painted close-ups that pop up when something special happens, like when you open a drawer to peruse its contents, or when a mysterious new neighbor answers your knock on their door. The interface makes use of a verb coin, consisting of “Look,” “Converse,” “Use” and “Pick up.” While you do get a couple of generic replies sometimes, the writer has brilliantly included many unique responses. You can tickle Watson’s moustache, amongst many other possibilities that made me smile. Holmes will even talk to inanimate objects, often to the hilarity of bystanders. And when you try something truly outlandish, like picking up one of your neighbors, Holmes will break the fourth wall and either question the player’s good manners, or his own musculature.

What makes The Beekeeper’s Picnic feel like a real Sherlock Holmes detective mystery is that you need to gather clues by closely examining people. From close-up depictions of them you can then examine individual aspects like their face, hands or clothes. Any clues you find are added to the blackboard in your “brain attic,” which you can enter with a click on an icon next to the inventory in the top left of the screen. You will actually see Sherlock standing in the middle of an attic, walls adorned with portraits of all characters in the game, on which he can comment. On the blackboard in the corner of this imaginary attic, you will have to combine the right clues to make a deduction, which then opens up new dialogue options when talking to people, or give Sherlock enough incentive to perform certain actions he was hesitant to at first, like gaining illegal access to other people’s territory.

There are a handful of people to keep track of, including your housekeeper, several neighbors like a seamstress and a shop owner, a mysterious new tenant who refuses to talk to you, Police Constable Webber trying to control a crowd on the beach, a feisty little girl named Tilda, and a Holmes-copycatting young boy named Sanjay, all of them with their little parts to play. The roles are completely voiced, with such professional-sounding actors I often felt like I was listening to an audiobook. Sometimes the pauses between sentences are a bit long, making me think the game had frozen momentarily, and often there seems to be a drop in volume as well, though I think that’s really just context-related with the voice actor speaking most softly. I quite enjoyed the developer’s sense of humor in providing lines for non-human “characters” as well, which to me attests to the game’s cozy, more cartoonish vibe.

The Beekeeper's Picnic – A Sherlockian Adventure

Genre:	Mystery
Presentation:	2D or 2.5D
Theme:	Crime solving, Adaptation
Perspective:	Third-Person
Graphic Style:	Pixel art
Gameplay:	Investigative, Cozy
Control:	Point-and-click
Game Length:	Short (1-5 hours)
Difficulty:	Low

The village of Fulworth has several locations: Holmes’s house, of course, with three bedrooms, a living room and kitchen. Outside is his bee farm, guarded by his trusty canine companion Toby. Further down the road you will find a couple of other cottages and a village festival. And of course there’s the perfect picnic spot, overlooking the beach. You travel between these locations by use of an overview map. Each scene has hotspots to examine, though far less than you would expect at first glance. The environments are filled with many visual details but not everything can be interacted with. At one point I thought I had to use Toby to follow a particular scent, but what I thought was his leash hanging on a hook turned out not to be an active hotspot. That left me fairly puzzled about how to take the dog along, since trying to literally pick him up only led to a funny comment.

Still, the number of things you can interact with are sure to keep you entertained. Going over each of them with all four options of the verb coin, it took me a full two hours of rather slow-paced exploration before I visited that one place on the map where the plot finally thickened – or, well, came into existence, actually, since I didn’t really have much to do during those first two hours. Thankfully, that changed and my initial disappointment of working through a rather low-event game vanished instantly. Was it my own fault for not visiting that particular location at the very start? Perhaps. But if it was so important, then the player shouldn’t have been given such undirected freedom in where to go from the start. Elementary, my dear adventure gamer!

While the main goal of The Beekeeper’s Picnic is, in effect, organising Watson’s picnic by getting your hands on a full hamper, a nice bottle of cordial, and a good spot to put down your blanket, you will have to work through a number of small mysteries the cast of characters present you with to achieve those things. There’s the case of the stolen cat, the case of the missing village festival judge, and the case of the strange “mermaid.” These aren’t separate chapters, just separate but interwoven mysteries that help distinguish the different puzzles you have to solve.

Thankfully the charming pixel art and writing make for an interesting experience, since the inventory puzzles alone won’t keep you occupied for long, partly because some of them have multiple solutions available. And yet as easy as the puzzles are, the developer has included an in-game hint system. Using the telephone in your home, you can ring up Sherlock’s brother Mycroft in his London Diogenes Club, and he will offer a single but clear piece of advice on how to proceed. I never had to do this during my thorough four-hour playthrough, though I did try it out. It’s a nice nod to a familiar character from the original stories, though likely superfluous unless you are indeed a newcomer to adventure games and require more guidance.

The Beekeeper’s Picnic has a soothing piano-based score that further mellows the pace of the game. It harks back to simpler and slower times, when people didn’t rush around everywhere, befitting a game set a century ago. You can prompt Sherlock to play the violin in his home whenever you feel the urge, and several sound effects and animations liven up the village of Fulworth: buzzing bees, the seamstress busily working her sewing machine, the shop owner preparing her wares, a cat snoring under the kitchen table, bird song in every outdoor scene, a juggling clown performing at the village fete, and most funnily of all, Sherlock’s overacted sneaking animation when he goes somewhere he shouldn’t.

I did notice a couple of flaws with the game. One is purely technical, as Sherlock sometimes clips through other characters when you walk towards an exit. Others relate to design choices, such as those exits not even being indicated. Sometimes I had trouble leaving a scene, and on one occasion I completely missed the second half of a location because I didn’t realize it would scroll sideways. There are also some continuity issues. For instance, there are two ways to gain access to a particular room and retrieve a key item there, one of which is to simply ask the owner. I chose the other option, even before I had any reason to do so yet, unaware at the time that I actually COULD ask the owner. I just did it because I could, which is typical adventure game behavior. Later on, though, when the need did become apparent, I could still go ask the owner’s permission to borrow said item, even though I already had it in my inventory and my alternate solution had been discovered by then. 

Final Verdict

Its little blemishes show there’s still room for improvement, but these are more than made up for by the beautiful artwork, funny writing, and audiobook-quality voice cast. While the puzzles don’t hold much challenge, the writer’s commitment to providing unique and funny responses adds even more charm to this cozy point-and-click adventure. Just be sure to set your expectations accordingly: Sherlock Holmes is retired here, after all, so don’t expect a dazzling mystery with blood spatters all over the place, even if young Sanjay might wish there to be, just to see Sherblock in action. Instead it’s the tale of a man finally trying to show his appreciation for his dear friend after years of rudeness and neglect. The story won’t go into the annals of literature with The Hound of the Baskervilles or A Study in Scarlet, but if you are in the mood for some lighthearted fun, The Beekeeper’s Picnic is good for a cozy afternoon of breezy adventuring with some honeyed tea and biscuits.

Johnny played The Beekeeper’s Picnic on PC using a review code provided by the game’s publisher.