Others say...

"Pros and Cons Like Most Stuff"
I could type a school report on this thing, but I'll put it down plain and simple (as much as possible):

Pros: Loved the graphics! British accents pretty accurate and genuine. Not quite historically correct. This was supposed to occur during the 1890's, yet Miss Lavinia Bromsby looks far from it. Her dress lacks the leg-of-mutton sleeves and has a shockingly unmodest neckline; something one would never see on a "mature damsel," as the Sherlock Holmes Society of London puts it. Her hair is not put up, but we can make the excuse for her that she was returning to England from Somewhere I Forgot. ;) The story was ok, but didn't have Doyle's "magic touch." The clues were challenging to find, which I think is good and bad.

Cons: Well, I got this from the library and would recomend you to do the same if your library has this. What I absolutely HATED, was that once in a while, due to no fault of my own, the game FROZE! A few times I got it to start again by waiting until Christmas, but about 3 times I had to reboot. Be extrememly careful when playing, is my advice. Don't over click or get carried away. Another thing that was annoying was that They wouldn't let you out of the mansion until you found all the clues. I found about 20 clues but still wasn't allowed out the door. I must have examined each room 10 times; every square inch, mind! But to no avail. Poor Holmes must have gotten a sore throat from all the times he said, "It is not time to join Watson. I have not examined everything yet."

Thankfully, They let you save games.

Only play if you are a true Sherlockian; there is no other way you can possibly enjoy it.

"I wanted more than pretty pictures"
Hello? Adventure-game software developers? GRAPHICS ARE NOT ENOUGH. Yes, the pictures are lovely, but I'd rather have characters that actually moved where and when I wanted them to than closeup shots of servants' facial blemishes.

As mentioned by others, the dialogue and story are so clumsy and tedious that I stopped caring who did or said what, when, where, how, or why about halfway through the game. It just wasn't worth the mental RAM to keep it straight. There were many times I found myself whining "Oh, would you just shut UP already!" at the characters. I hit the space bar to make them stop babbling, but you still have to process every conversation in order to progress. I usually used these boring bits to get a snack or take a bathroom break, then just read the dialogue as recorded in the notebook.

What really killed the game for me, however, were the timed tests. The #1 reason I play ONLY adventure games is because I enjoy being able to explore, experiment, investigate, and solve at my leisure. I don't want aliens, goblins, or goons jumping out trying to kill me, and I DON'T WANT TIMED TESTS. I want to challenge my mind, not my touchpad-tapping finger. Quick-clicking is NOT a life skill or talent I need or desire to perfect, so the timed tests are simply annoying and insulting. Having to repeat the same interminable steps again and again and again and AGAIN simply because you've got five seconds left and Holmes won't move his butt no matter where or how much you click on the path he has to travel is not my idea of fun. I finally gave up and downloaded a cheat save for the forest fire test because Holmes always got stuck on his return trip, refusing to move despite the white footprint icon. Since when is that fun?

I don't recommend this game. Unless, of course, you simply adore timed tests that don't work, dialogue that doesn't end, stories that don't matter, and closeups of facial blemishes.

"Totally frustrating"
I looked forward to this game, as I enjoy Sherlock Holmes. There was a long, boring movie at the beginning, which set up the gameplay, but I sat through it because I thought, "Ok, when the game actually starts, this may be fun because the graphics are pretty good." WRONG.

I was so bored trying to move Holmes (or Watson) around the room and down hallways, or over to talk to someone (extremely cumbersome and awkward movements) that I thought I would go nuts. Well, what do you know, I DID go nuts because it seemed like after you finally got them to walk somewhere (all the while doing military 90 degree turns, etc.) all you could do was talk (and talk and talk) to people, without being able to properly explore a room and look for "clues". He's quite a chatty guy. Once in awhile you could pick up an item, but not often enough. And, when you could, he would say, something dumb like "Why, what is this??". After about the fourth time he said that I wanted to bonk him on the head.

I was so frustrated by the awkward movement of the characters, and the boring conversations, that I QUIT THE GAME after 45 minutes. I couldn't stand it anymore...and, I rarely quit games.

Oh, yes, I did get a giggle watching Holmes "open" a door by using his hand to twist the wallpaper on the wall, instead of the doorknob. Very unrealistic movements for those type of things.

If I could have rated this a zero, I would have. Don't buy the game, unless you feel you have to have it...and if you do, get it for fifty cents at a garage sale or something.

"Too convoluted to be entertaining"
Sherlock Holmes and his Boswell, Watson, have been invited to a reception a noted industrialist, Melvyn Bromsby, is giving for his daughter's 18th birthday. Although Holmes hates social engagements of this type, they deicde to stop in on the way to the opera. And a good thing, too! Just as Bromsby starts his speech, a shot rings out and he falls dead. The smoke clears from the doorway from which the shot seems to have come, revealing his daughter! It seems obvious she murdered her father. But has she? Only Sherlock Holmes can put together the evidence and reveal the mystery.

There are three ways of looking at _Secret of the Silver Earring_: as a Sherlock Holmes pastiche, as an adventure game and as a mystery. The first of these is the easiest to deal with: for the most part SotSE is an excellent homage to the world's first consulting detective. The character realizations are pretty good and the dialog is very authentic. The backgrounds--particularly the sitting room at Baker Street--are immediately recognisable. Only a few details detract from the overall impression: Holmes' eyes are the wrong colour, for example.

When it comes to the story, however, SotSE doesn't measure up. There are far too many characters and far too many divergent lines of thought for a real Sherlockian feel. Holmes' best cases really are, when you possess the relevant information, "absurdly simple." This one really isn't. And that gets in the way of its success, both as a mystery and as a game.

For fans of 3rd person adventures with oodles of characters and conversations, SotSE is not without interest. In fact, it starts out quite well, as you go from place to place gathering your evidence. Gameplay is relatively straightforward, with a smart cursor giving you travel, conversation and manipulation options. The one problem is that Holmes (or Watson, who you occasionally play) doesn't always readily respond to your commands. This becomes an issue in the latter portions of the game. Initially, the puzzles are engaging: neither too complex nor too simple, with a balance of inventory and mechanical. Two timed puzzles in the last third of the game, however, are very nearly game stoppers. One, where you must sneak into a building without being caught, is virtually impossible to complete without recourse to a walkthrough. The other, where you must navigate a maze rapidly, would have been less frustrating without the response issue previously mentioned. Because of it I had to repeat the task numerous times and barely succeeded in the end. This puzzle is all the more frustrating because it turns out to have been useless: though ostensibly you're trying to save evidence by quenching a fire before valuable papers burn, when you finally succeed the burnt papers have no value.

At the end of each day you must complete a quiz about the evidence you've gathered in order to proceed. The quizzes themselves are not difficult, although the answers to one or two questions are not crystal clear. But they did not seem to lead you anywhere. Rather than elucidate the mystery, the evidence just becomes more and more cumbersome. I expected, by the end of the game, to have some idea what was going on. And I did manage to peg the main murderer, but it was more by intuition than deduction.

As a mystery, SotSE is not well put together. The game is set up in such a way that I think it would be virtually impossible to come up with the entire solution. In the first place, there are so many characters that you just can't keep track of them, and there is no device within the game to let you do so. A body turns up and seems to have no connection to anything else until the end, when the victim turns out to have been someone you spoke 3 words to on the first day, whose name was never given. Someone turns out to have been someone else, but there's no way to determine this or even any clue that you should. The case hinges on the murderer's having been in a certain country at a certain time, but you never actually get to see the evidence that proves he was there. In a true Holmes story, the detective would at least partially explain things as you went along, or at least make pointed comments. There is some attempt to do this here, but most of the comments are so cryptic as to be no help or so trivial as to be pointless. Or the information you get from them is never entered into evidence at all.

In the end, the solution is expounded in a 15-minute movie that is incredibly hard to follow and just plain boring. I would have liked this game better if you had been able to marshall your facts and come up with a few answers at the end of each day. As it was, there were so many bodies and so much to keep track of that by the end I didn't even care.

I think I got through this game in about 20 hours, taking breaks for a week at a time while I steeled myself to complete the timed puzzles. If you want to play Silver Earring, thnking of it as a piece of interactive fiction rather than a game might help. I think completing a game should leave a person with a feeling of accomplishment, but this one just had me wondering why I bothered.

"Interesting story and gameplay, but had some issues"
This is one of those games where you spend most of your time either walking around talking to people about a million things, or staring at the screen trying to figure out what little blemish you missed on the floor that needs to be examined in order to continue. Overall, I thought it was well executed for this type of game. However, the most annoying aspect of it was the character movement--it was very clumsy and sluggish, and there were times I wished for a "warp" feature to speed things up. If you like hunt and search games with an excellent story and lots of conversations to pay attention to, then this is for you.