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Frogwares has announced its remaking the 2007 PC, Nintendo Wii title Sherlock Holmes The Awakened for PS5, PS4. It will be a complete overhaul that doesn't use any assets or code from the original game, which was a crossover between the Sherlock Holmes universe and Lovecraft's Cthulhu. This game is what was first teased as Project Palianytsia, and the Ukrainian developer is turning to Kickstarter for extra funding.

On PS5 and PS4, Sherlock Holmes The Awakened has been rebuilt with new visuals and assets in Unreal Engine 4, and has new animations and big changes made to the cutscenes. New gameplay mechanics related to investigations will be introduced, and so too will new side quests. The story itself is also undergoing a complete overhaul, with rewrites connecting the narrative to a younger Sherlock Holmes. The UI will be dramatically different, the third-person camera has been changed, and new English voice-overs have been recorded.

Due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Frogwares is encountering challenges that require it to "stop, regroup and adapt. This takes time, effort, and in some cases money that would normally be marked to fund the production of a game." As such, it's turning to Kickstarter so its most devout fans can financially support the studio and earn some rewards once development is complete and copies are shipped.

"Through Kickstarter, we can offer these fans the chance to buy our next game now and be rightfully credited for their support in the game itself while also helping to determine some of the game’s final content and giving them a few extra rewards and bonuses," communications lead Sergey Oganesyan explained.

On the remake itself, feature designers team lead Jaroslav Martyniuk sees it as a completely different game that only uses the original story as a basis. "We are essentially rebuilding the entire game from scratch to run Unreal Engine 4, using all new assets or ones we can cleverly rework from Sherlock Holmes Chapter One which came out only a few months ago. We’re also adding entirely new gameplay mechanics while reworking the original ones to expand the ways players will be solving the cases."