The Beekeeper's Picnic @beekeeperspicnic - Tumblr Blog

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It is the 1920s, and in a sleepy Sussex village, beekeeper and former world's greatest detective Sherlock Holmes (James Quinn, Apostasy), is trying to arrange a pleasant clifftop picnic for his lifelong companion Dr Watson (Andrew James Spooner, Muppets Most Wanted). The only problem is that a series of mysteries keep getting in the way!

Features

Explore a seaside town It’s the day of the village fete, a suspicious new neighbour has taken a lease on a long-abandoned cottage and something strange is happening down on the beach…

Interrogate and befriend a fully professionally voice-acted cast of eccentric characters including a clown with a tragic past (Felix Trench, Wooden Overcoats), the local leader of the women's institute (Alison Skilbeck, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, (yes that one)) budding young naturalist (Alice Osmanski, Sanditon), a wannabe showman (Layla Katib, Victoriocity) and a prickly police officer. And lots more. I love this cast to bits.

Make deductions and decisions. Puzzles have multiple solutions, some of which may please your neighbours more than others. What path will you choose? Who will you enlist to help you?

Phone for help of you get stuck! Your older brother Mycroft (Richard Rycroft, Game of Thrones) is always ready to act as your consultant, just give him a call at his club if you need a hint.

A relaxing bespoke soundtrack by @sandygarnelle

🐝Full version now available for PC/Linux/Steamdeck!🐝

Want to play on macOS? Read this guide!

Hey so, I'm @jabbage, and I've spent the past few years and thousands of hours making the funny, poignant, cosy, queer game I always wanted to play. I can't wait to share it with all of you!

Steam | Itch.io | Discord | Press Kit

(Also feel free to ask me a question about it!)

#sherlock holmes #game development #indie games #adventure games #cosy games #queer games #dr watson #I had to add him as a tag because they need to be together #that's sort of the whole thesis of the game #asexual sherlock holmes #Youtube

beekeeperspicnic

By popular request ;D Holmes being neurodivergent was something I thought about a lot while writing the game (channelling my own experiences a lot of the time!) and I know that our director discussed it with the actors, too. This is definitely not all the scenes or even the most prominent examples, but they're the ones that felt non-spoilery!

This is from my Sherlock Holmes point and click game The Beekeeper's Picnic which releases March 26th 2025!

Wishlist on Steam | Itch.io Demo | Discord | Press Kit

beekeeperspicnic

When you're trying to run your medical practice but there's intense amounts of queer pining going on:

beekeeperspicnic

Everything is placeholder graphics and I expect in the finished game he will be writing at his desk or something during this scene, but it is also in character for him to just awkwardly stand there like "I don't mind whatever these two have going on, but I wish they'd do it somewhere else so I can get back to my Special Hobbies.

His name is Dr Herring, help me choose a first name for him:

Hieronymus

Theophrastus

Voting ended onMay 30

The Mona Lisa is missing! Sleuth through a sprawling space museum, read the past through psychic abilities and unravel an interstellar art c

beekeeperspicnic

Hieronymus Herring it is!

Wow, what a name!

He's such a little ray of sunshine.

garaks-gay-garderobe

Have even more @beekeeperspicnic fanart:

protect the kids. (Sanjay and Tilda are my favourite side characters in the game, they are so cute, I love them!!!)

subhuman-and-feedable

Best Johnlock?

ACD Johnlock

Granada Johnlock

BBC Johnlock

RDJ Johnlock

Jonklock (Sherlock and Co.)

Fawx and Stallion Johnlock

The Beekeeper’s Picnic Johnlock

Voting ended onJun 1

beekeeperspicnic

I'm happy the canon came out on top! :D

(And that Beekeeper's Picnic didn't come dead last)

vancruejovi

Dont you love it when the project is so self indulgent you can put your public domain blorbos in there cause why not (I know Holmes doesn’t actually wear the deerstalker that often but look at themmm)

The game was partly inspired by the line in ‘The Bruce Partington Plans’ where Sherlock says that the community is lucky that he wasn’t a criminal. And I thought of a game where you play as a ‘consulting detective’ who pulls an Arsene Lupin or Jonathan Wilde and does heists under the police’s noses. I honestly kind of gave up on making my own games because I just could not wrap my head around it, until I played Beekeeper’s Picnic and I was so enamoured with the game that it pushed me to finally be brave enough to learn AGS. (If you haven’t played @beekeeperspicnic please please PLEASE do. They’re most likely sick of me tagging them lmao I’m sorry. But I genuinely adore that game so much and more people need to see their work)

Anyway that’s why there’s a silly Holmes and Watson cameo in my thief game

beekeeperspicnic

Yesssssssssssss gogogogo

This sounds like such a fun concept for a game and the art looks brilliant.

fangirlsovertoomanythings

The way that most of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories’ most horrible villains are rich dudes that are abusive to women, in a time such as the 1880’s, compels me.

gardnerhill

There’s a whole subset of Sherlock Holmes stories that could be labeled Asshole Guys Try to Control Women’s Money.

three--rings

Yup, there’s a huge number of times where Sherlock Holmes is the ONLY person to take a young woman’s complaint or worry seriously and finds out someone is up to some serious evil. Holmes also shows a lot of compassion and empathy with the victims over and over again. (This is why I find “Secretly a woman” or “Trans” Holmes headcanons much more convincing than “sociopath” Holmes.)

waterhobbit

I am never going to shut up about how much I specifically love The Adventure of The Copper Beeches because it is literally Sherlock Holmes listening to a young lady he does not know except as a potential client, agreeing with her that a potential job she has interviewed for that she thinks is SUPER SKETCHY is, indeed, sketchy as fuck and when she says she’s probably gonna take the job anyways because the money is good and she needs it going “OKAY I GUESS but for the love of god please write to us so we know you’re okay we will literally drop everything and jump on a train if you want us to”.

The job turns out to indeed be sketchy as fuck, she writes to them, Holmes and Watson drop everything and jump on a train when she asks them to. I read this story for the first time when I was twelve and it made a HUGE impression.

three--rings

This is also the basis for a lot of speculation about Holmes’ family life. The idea that he has been a victim of abuse, or his mother was abused (or even murdered by his father.) There’s definitely SOMETHING that makes him very aware of how dangerous isolated families can be, and the dark things that can happen behind closed doors. Plus, of course, the motivation to devote himself to stopping crime. And yes, so much of it is of the personal type.

volkswagonblues

dude see this is one aspect of the original books i NEVER understand why modern remakes (cough cough) don’t go all in on. Like, in the 21th c we HAVE all the dumb forensic shit that made Victorian Holmes stand out, but we STILL DON’T HAVE uh….you know, compassion for women and minorities, or the willingness to believe them, adequate community support for domestic violence or hate crimes, etc. etc. which you’d think is exactly where a renegade consulting detective would come in handy. A good modern day Sherlock Holmes remake, instead of trying to convince us that Holmes is some super genius for being better than fingerprint analysis or whatever, could have him just be…a good person who helps out people the police can’t and won’t help. There you go. That’s how to write a relevant modern Holmes.

fahbee

One thing that annoys me is how much the BBC version of Sherlock (and the fandom around it) focus on police cases or cold cases. In the stories, Holmes’ bread and butter cases had fuck-all to do with the police and in a few stories, he actively works around/against them, or outright lies to them. Of the many, many things I wish that show had done differently, this is one is particularly obnoxious since it’s such a gimme.

tiger-in-the-flightdeck

There were very few actual murder cases in the Canon, and Holmes handled them either one of two ways:

Option one: The murder victim was innocent while the killer was an abusive bastard, see Speckled Band. Conclusion, arrest and have the killer charged (Or in the case of Speckled Band, indirectly murder him yourself then shrug and go home)

Option two: The victim was murdered to protect someone that the victim was abusing, or for vengeance, see Boscombe Valley, Devil’s Foot, Abbey Grange. Conclusion, Oops, I don’t know who the killer is, I am suddenly incompetent, oh look a pheasant.

faejilly

#my favorite murder in holmes canon#is when they straight up witness a lady murder her blackmailer#do nothing except destroy his other blackmail material#and then straight up lie to lestrade about it#sherlock holmes#more of this in modern adaptations pls (via @cactusspatz )

muffinworry

Let’s not forget the time Holmes helps a young woman who’s being catfished by her own stepfather to steal her inheritance, and when the villain sneers that the law can’t touch him, Holmes grabs a horsewhip out of sheerest chivalry.

smokingtigerhiddengun

So, the most canon-accurate iteration of Sherlock Holmes in the last few decades is actually Benoit Blanc….

marzipanandminutiae

I think it’s also important to note, and complicates our ideas about what the highly patriarchal/misogynistic society of 19th century England looked like, that these stories SOLD

they were POPULAR

the Victorians LIKED reading about women who won out over shitty men in their lives, even when that plotline reaffirmed a woman’s power and agency or put an active sexist in his place (ie Irene Adler besting Holmes)

which is fascinating in light of. you know. [gestures broadly at all of Victorian gender dynamics, laws, etc.]

sailor-hobbiton

So yes, Benoit Blanc is the best modern Sherlock.

beekeeperspicnic

When you're trying to run your medical practice but there's intense amounts of queer pining going on:

beekeeperspicnic

His name is Dr Herring, help me choose a first name for him:

Hieronymus

Theophrastus

Voting ended onMay 30

The Mona Lisa is missing! Sleuth through a sprawling space museum, read the past through psychic abilities and unravel an interstellar art c

#the museum of everything #reblogs appreciated for further reach #The world must name this doctor.

When you're trying to run your medical practice but there's intense amounts of queer pining going on:

#the museum of everything

litsenn

Playing the lovely game @beekeeperspicnic and getting really emotional about Holmes and Watson 🥹💜

beekeeperspicnic

Yaaaay, I love seeing your reactions so much!

When we recorded this dialogue with the actors, I was reacting exactly like you are here! :D

beekeeperspicnic

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Poison Belt The Game!

An interactive retelling of the original sci-fi novella from 1913, with added silly bits.

Customise your characters profession and choose from appropriately Doylean hobbies. Will you be (for example) a spiritualist who can see ghosts, a wannabe cowboy with amazing science skillz, or a doctor with strangely intense sexual magnetism?

I made this in 48 hours while chugging down lots of Mountain Dew so just temper your expectations, ok?

Screenshots of this real game which is real:

Play it online here: (Yes, this is entirely real, for real, it's real and I made it.)

A text-based adventure. A browser game made in HTML5

Way back in 2020/2021, I was pitching lots of middle grade graphic novel ideas to publishers. Although none of them worked out in the end, some of them actually got pretty far through the process- contracts drawn up, acquisition meetings held etc.

One which got absolutely nowhere was a project called... The Museum of Everything. The main character was a girl called Smudge, a nickname she borrowed from her pet cat which had died (this made sense in context. Possibly. Or possibly not, I think there are various reasons why no publisher wanted this thing) who ended up spending her Summer working as an intern doing odd-jobs at a giant space museum, befriended something/someone who may or may not be the Mona Lisa.

When I was thinking up project ideas after completing The Beekeeper's Picnic, I returned back to the project and realised that if I created a new, more mature protagonist, the plot would make a GREAT adventure game.

And I tried to think of a name for my new protagonist that sounded a bit like Smudge, but which suited an older lady better. It immediately hit me... Madge! Perfect! Same last three letters and everything!

Now, friends... I am having to have a long hard think about why the name 'Madge' was in my brain, why I was able to call it to mind so easily.

This whole post a long way of saying that my Madge might have accidentally sort of been inspired by @224bbaker Madge, I can't rule that out. But I hope that more sleuthin' Madges in the world can't be a bad thing.

#the museum of everything #Madges United #do listen to Fawx and Stallion #Doooo

Robin Sylvester, gadabout demonologist, finds time between gin martinis to solve the most magical crimes 1920s London has to offer.

I'm just going to slide this project towards my followers.

And highlight the lines:

Inspired by the Golden Age of detective fiction, it dares to ask, “What if Lord Peter Wimsey was gay and also trans and he teamed up with a psychic lesbian to solve crimes involving demons?”

#kickstarter #audio drama #for your attention

iphigenesis

in a way john watson is a fantasy (what if you had this brilliant enigmatic friend and what if he liked you in particular and what if he offered you the excitement of youth and adventures and a way out of boring society life and all without having to actually give up your status as a gentleman so you could have the best of both worlds) and in a way sherlock holmes is a fantasy (what if someone never got tired of you despite your various strange habits and mood swings and instead of simply tolerating you they genuinely liked you and what if you didn’t have to live alone forever and what if you never had to give up doing the things you love) and of course there’s the most fantastical part of it all (what if you could afford london housing prices)

georgiacooked

It's Dracula day! 🦇

Happy 26th, everyone! If you're looking to devour more Dracula content today, might I once again entice you to pick up The Holmwood Foundation, the found-footage audio drama sequel to Dracula, written and produce by myself and @fiotrethewey

A secretive organisation. Two antagonistic work colleagues. Dracula’s severed head.

The Holmwood Foundation follows Maddie Townsend (Rebecca Root) and Jeremy Larkin (Sean Carlsen), two co-workers at the mysterious Holmwood Foundation, as they are possessed by the ghosts of Jonathan and Mina Harker, and embark on a road trip across the country in an effort to achieve their ghost's wishes: stop Dracula once and for all.