My sister got me this game for Christmas, and we played case 1 over the course of two days. This is a fully narrative experience, where you're given a newspaper and a scenario book, and based on your decisions, you flip to different areas of the book and read the clues there. Once you feel like you've gathered enough intel to solve whatever mystery was presented, you open the exam book, where you're presented with the key questions - and finally, Sherlock's conclusions.
There's always a risk of tedium in games like this - lots of pointing at spots on the map and navigating through the scenario book and trying not to read anything by accident. The mystery is all the more difficult/tedious because you don't know what questions are actually going to be asked. My sister and I laughed when there was a question that we had no idea would even be a thing appeared during the case summary.
The game also has a scoring system, by which you're rewarded for answering more questions with fewer leads followed up on. This goes against my every Phoenix Wright instinct. And the fact that you don't know what the questions are ahead of time seems to run counter to this as well. We had a lot of fun reading through the clues nad investigating every last nook and cranny - tawdry affairs! espionage! - but it was incredibly anticlimactic when we realized Sherlock deduced the solution in like four clues, didn't follow up on basically any lead that even possibly seemed irrelevant, and made some logical leaps that would leave him unable to answer some of the side questions.
So I think the ruleset of this game hampers it, as well as its cumbersome physical navigation. That said, actually trying to figure out the mystery was a good time. It'll be a long time before this hits the table again, but when it does, I think I'm prepared to have fun again, and perhaps disregard scoring entirely. (Though maybe the scoring is a good idea to prevent us from searching for four hours?)
So I have this game (or perhaps the second one?) and played with my mother once. For background we have escaped medium level escape rooms together just the two of us.
We read every damn entry on one of those cases and had zero idea what the solution was, and it turned out to be some off the wall inference of how an unrelated news story could be related.