I bought all SH games and decided to start at the beginning, and I'm very disappointed. And yeah, I know this game is old but that is not a very good excuse.
You can only play it at fullscreen (in which everything is pixelated and hard to look at - and I only have a 13'' screen, which is considerably small), you can't alt+tab away from the game unless you're in for restarting it (you can't even access the Steam layer) and it happens a lot that the game crashes at cutscenes (that stuff you spent the last hour working on? Lost!).
If that is not enough to harden your way through, items are very very well hidden, which is not a bad point per se, but I found they were just overly hidden for it to be fun. I don't know whether this was made on purpose (since Sherlock's primary skill is observing it makes sense to make it hard to "see" useful stuff) or not.
Also, the puzzles are really difficult (difficult enough they're no longer fun) and most of the time will require you take paper and pen (since you can't alt+tab out of the game) and spend some long time on them, which could be fun if you like it (like I do), but, in this case, it just isn't.

Yes, the story is fine, the way you can get letters (backstory) is well thought of, moving through rooms/levels is a very good mechanic, but the bad points weight, by far, much more than the good points.
So, unless you enjoy very difficult and time-consuming games, don't spend your money on this.
If you get this in a SH bundle and need to check it out just because you're a fan, don't be afraid to have a walkthrough ready on your phone!

Its an classic, adventure. More like an escape room game. The riddles are really, really hard to figure out what to do.

This game hasn't aged well, and I doubt it was ever much fun to begin with. Moving around and picking up evidence is a total pixel hunt, and the game as a whole handles poorly. It's incredibly easy to get stuck because the game wants you to do some random illogical interaction to move on which you usually find by just clicking on everything until something happens. Dying and end of level cutscenes crash the game on windows 7. The voice acting is so bad it's actually pretty funny. The story was almost acceptable, but Holmes' customary explanation of the mystery at the end was badly done and I couldn't understand it. I wouldn't play this unless you really want to beat the whole Holmes series, or you bought the bundle and feel like you might as well try it.

Old, awkward and broken controls. Unintuitive interface with sub-standard... everything. I mean the game feels so 1st gen... Not one that stood the test of time that's for sure. Of course, all this had to start someplace, Kinda like a bad Atari 2600 game: It exists for a reason.

gameplay is too old