Eleven Sherlock Holmes Games and Counting: Frogwares of Kyiv

A company in Kyiv has been making games starring Sherlock Holmes for more than 20 years. It is Frogwares. The company’s list of games has 11 titles with “Sherlock Holmes” in the name, from Sherlock Holmes: The Mystery of the Mummy in 2002 to Sherlock Holmes The Awakened in 2023.

The company was founded in 2000 and is based in Ukraine and Ireland. In 2019 it released The Sinking City, a game unrelated to Holmes, and then spent more than four years in a dispute with its publisher over the rights to sell it. On August 18, 2026, it released a sequel, The Sinking City 2. Drawing on company announcements and news reports, we follow the history of this company (as of October 2026).

Founded in Kyiv in 2000

The company profile on Frogwares’ official website says it is an independent game development studio founded in 2000, with bases in Ukraine and Ireland. On August 26, 2020, in a Steam announcement, the company marked the day: “Frogwares turns 20 years old!”

According to the Kyiv Post, Kyiv’s English-language newspaper (August 2019), the company was founded by the Frenchman Waël Amr. Together with another Frenchman, he set it up in Kyiv in 2000. The paper explains that the name is a self-deprecating reference to “froggies,” an English moniker for the French. The team that started with six people had, at the time of the article, grown to more than 80, many of them Ukrainians.

The same article says the company had a subsidiary in Dublin, Ireland from the start, used as a legal entity for dealing with Western companies. Amr says that in the 2000s Ukraine had no dollars or euros in circulation, and the national currency, the hryvnia, fluctuated so much that it was risky to use for business. The copyright notice on the company’s official website reads “Frogwares Ireland Ltd,” and the site says that using the name “Sherlock Holmes” in games and other fields requires the consent of “Frogwares Ireland.”

A Timeline of the Games

We have rearranged the list of games on the company profile page (“games developed since 2000”) in chronological order. For the two entries from 2024 onward, the release dates are ones we confirmed in Steam announcements.

How Many Holmes Games? It Depends How You Count

In the company’s game list, 11 games have “Sherlock Holmes” in the title. In this count, however, the 2006 The Awakened, its 2008 rework, and the version rebuilt from scratch in 2023 are each counted as one game.

On the other hand, “Sherlock Holmes Complete Adventures,” a bundle the company sells on Steam, offers “every adventure of Sherlock Holmes and John Watson ever released” and contains 11 games. It includes The Mystery of the Persian Carpet and Sherlock Holmes and The Hound of The Baskervilles, which are not in the company’s game list, and leaves out the 2002 The Mystery of the Mummy and the 2006 version of The Awakened. Both come to 11, but the contents are not the same.

The Same Game Under a Different Title

The 2007 Sherlock Holmes versus Arsene Lupin is sold on Steam under the title Sherlock Holmes – Nemesis. The Steam description says that it is the story of the young French burglar Arsène Lupin challenging Scotland Yard and Holmes. The 2004 game, too, appears in the company’s list with two titles side by side, “Secret of The Silver Earring” and “The Case of the Silver Earring,” and on Steam it is Sherlock Holmes: The Silver Earring.

Toward a Young Holmes

About Sherlock Holmes Chapter One, released on November 16, 2021, the company wrote in a July 2020 Steam announcement that it had decided to show an unknown side of the world’s most famous detective: his youth.

On July 29, 2022, the company announced that its next game would be a from-the-ground-up remake of the 2006 The Awakened, with a substantially rewritten story. It is the story of a young Holmes taking on his first big case with Watson, whom he has just met. The story is inspired by the works of H. P. Lovecraft, and the game had previously been teased under the working name “Project Palianytsia.”

The Dispute Over the Rights to The Sinking City

The Sinking City is a game inspired by the works of Lovecraft and set in a flooded town of the 1920s. Its publisher was the French company Bigben Interactive / Nacon. In August 2020, the game disappeared from several online stores. We set the two sides’ accounts side by side, drawing on the statement from Frogwares published by the British games outlet VGC and the announcement from Nacon.

According to Frogwares’ statement, the contract was a “licensing agreement” signed in 2017, two years after production began, under which, in exchange for a financial contribution to the development, it gave the publisher the right to sell the game on four platforms, and the intellectual property in the game is its own. It explains that the publisher kept paying late, that it filed a lawsuit in August 2019, and that it terminated the contract on April 20, 2020. Nacon rebutted that the statement misinterpreted the content of the contract, and said that the game’s development was “principally funded by NACON.”

According to an announcement Nacon issued on January 5, 2021, on October 28, 2020 the Paris Court of Appeal ruled that Frogwares had terminated the contract in a “manifestly unlawful” manner and ordered the contract continued until its term ends or until a decision is made on the breach of contract. Frogwares, for its part, claims that the court twice rejected Nacon’s demand to hand over a Steam version, in July and October 2020 (according to the British outlet TheSixthAxis). As for the version Nacon put on sale on Steam in February 2021, Frogwares asked for its removal as an altered pirated copy, and Nacon denied this (according to Game Informer and TheSixthAxis).

On January 2, 2024, Frogwares announced that it had become the sole publisher of The Sinking City on all platforms, and wrote, “We’re happy to finally put this whole thing behind us.” The announcement does not say whether this came about through a court ruling or through negotiation.

Making Games Since 2022

On May 16, 2022, the company announced that it had received an Epic MegaGrant from Epic Games. It wrote that the grant would be used to relocate employees to safer regions and to support the lives of those who moved to the interior of Ukraine or to EU countries.

In its July 2022 announcement, the company explained why it would complete the remake of The Awakened by seeking backing on the crowdfunding site Kickstarter: the war keeps posing new challenges and requires money that would otherwise go into production. After the game came out on April 11, 2023, the company looked back and said that at the start of 2022 it had been planning a different game to be made by everyone in the company, but that the war broke that plan.

According to Game Developer, the company stopped selling in Russia on the online stores it controls and removed Russian-language support from The Awakened. In March 2025, it sought backing for The Sinking City 2 on Kickstarter, writing that the team is in Ukraine and remains completely independent.

Developing Through Blackouts and Attacks

On February 16, 2023, the company announced that it was postponing the release of The Awakened, writing that attacks on civilian infrastructure were causing continuing power outages and that it had to redo the production pipeline entirely. On October 21, 2025, it announced that it was postponing the release of The Sinking City 2 to the first half of 2026, citing attacks by drones and missiles and power outages. The actual release was on August 18, 2026. Household outage schedules are in our article on electricity prices and outages.

Among Kyiv’s Game Companies

In the same city, Kyiv, GSC Game World makes S.T.A.L.K.E.R. (our article on GSC).

A Dedication in 2014

In its 2019 article, the Kyiv Post reports that the 2014 game Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments was dedicated to the Heavenly Hundred, the people who died in the Euromaidan (for the Heavenly Hundred, see our article on the Day of Dignity and Freedom).