Detective Sherlock: Shadow Stalker Review: I Had More Fun Messing With the AI Than Solving the Case

The AI was the fun part. The detective game never made me care enough to finish the case

Detective Sherlock: Shadow Stalker lets you question AI-powered characters using almost anything you can think of. I spent a couple of hours doing exactly that, then got bored and moved on with my life.

I played for roughly two to three hours on PC, with around two hours captured in the gameplay video below. For most of that time, I was less interested in solving the mystery than I was in seeing what I could make the characters say.

That is the strange part of this review. I did not stop because I disliked the AI. The AI conversations were the part I enjoyed most. We recently looked at Steam’s AI Gaming Festival, and Shadow Stalker gave me a different question: what happens when the AI is more entertaining than the game built around it?

Detective Sherlock: Shadow Stalker Gameplay

You can watch around two hours of my Detective Sherlock: Shadow Stalker gameplay on YouTube. It shows most of my experience with the game, including a lot of me testing what its characters would put up with.

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Sherlock Holmes, but you can type almost anything

Detective Sherlock: Shadow Stalker is an Early Access detective game from Gamercury. You play as Sherlock Holmes in a mystery built around Baskerville Hall, collecting clues, exploring locations, questioning suspects, and trying to uncover what is behind the deaths surrounding the estate.

The big hook is the dialogue system. There are no fixed conversation choices. You type what you want to say, and the characters respond through AI-generated dialogue and voice.

Steam lists connections to Gemini, GPT, DeepSeek, GLM, and MiniMax. The developer says only the real-time dialogue text and voice are AI-generated, while the code and 3D art assets are handcrafted by the team.

So yes, if you prefer chatting with Gemini while pretending to be Sherlock Holmes, you can do that here.

I mostly messed with everyone

This is where my review stopped being a serious Sherlock Holmes investigation.

I started asking characters questions, pushing conversations in stupid directions, testing what they remembered, and seeing how far I could move away from what I was supposed to be doing. That became the game for me.

And for a while, it was great fun.

The freedom to type whatever comes into your head makes these conversations unpredictable enough that I kept wanting to try one more thing. Instead of carefully working through the case, I was wondering what would happen if I said something ridiculous, accused the wrong person, or simply refused to behave like Sherlock Holmes.

Two hours can disappear surprisingly quickly when you play it that way.

Then I remembered I was supposed to solve a murder

That is also where Shadow Stalker lost me.

I could not take the investigation seriously enough to care about finishing it. The more I treated the characters like an AI playground, the less interested I became in following the mystery properly.

The AI was not the problem. If anything, it saved the experience for me. The problem was that once I had spent enough time testing the conversations, I did not feel much pull from the detective game underneath them.

That may be completely different for someone who wants to take the case seriously. Gamercury says the Early Access version contains around 20 hours of content, so I saw only a small part of what is there.

I am not pretending otherwise. I played roughly two to three hours and stopped because I no longer wanted to continue.

AI conversation games are not new anymore

There is another reason the novelty wore off for me. Talking freely to AI-driven characters is no longer a completely new idea.

Shadow Stalker gives the concept a Sherlock Holmes setting, a structured investigation, clue gathering, character memories, and different possible outcomes. That gives it more shape than a simple chatbot experiment.

But the basic trick of typing almost anything and getting an AI character to answer has been done before. Once I had spent enough time testing that part, I needed the rest of the game to take over.

It did not.

Other players are enjoying it far more than I did

My 5/10 is clearly not the general Steam response.

At the time I checked, Detective Sherlock: Shadow Stalker had a Very Positive Steam rating, with 89% of 419 user reviews being positive.

That matters because this is not a case where players seem to be broadly rejecting the idea. A lot of people are getting something from it that I did not.

If you enjoy experimenting with AI characters and want to approach the investigation seriously, you may get much more out of it than I did.

This is not a 5/10 because it uses AI

Fix Gaming Channel is not anti-AI. We cover games because they are interesting, whether they use AI or not.

Good games, bad games, strange games, tiny indie projects, big releases, and experiments that are difficult to put into a box are all fair game. AI does not automatically make something good or bad.

In this case, the AI conversations were the reason I stayed as long as I did.

But I still have to review the game around them.

I cannot really say I thought it was a good game. Some people may even ask whether experiences built this heavily around AI conversation should be called games, interactive experiments, or something in between.

That is a discussion for another day.

I had fun. I messed with the characters. I laughed at some of the responses.

Then I got bored and moved on with my life.

Detective Sherlock: Shadow Stalker

Release: August 21, 2026 – Early Access

Genre: Adventure, Indie, RPG

Developer / Publisher: Gamercury

Platforms: PC via Steam

Related Reading

Steam’s AI Gaming Festival Is Live, and Its Lineup Is All Over the Place

Everyone Uses AI Now. So What Are We Really Disclosing?

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