Try it live Description
Miss Baird: A Gift for 221B is a single-room point-and-click puzzle game. It is the morning of September 7, 1888, at 221B Baker Street, London. Holmes and Watson are away on a case, leaving behind sunlight, dust and the traces of how they live: cigars in the coal scuttle, tobacco in the toe of a Persian slipper, unanswered letters pinned to the mantelpiece with a jackknife, and V.R. picked out in bullet holes on the wall.
Isabella "Bella" Baird, 13, is the niece of the landlady, Mrs. Hudson, down from Edinburgh to look after her aunt. Sent upstairs to open a window, she hears the door lock behind her. Holmes arranged it. Two months earlier, in this very room, she saw at a glance that a client was lying, and said nothing. He wants to know whether this child has a detective's gift.
The game takes about 30 minutes. There is no case, and you are not Holmes. You are Bella: find the clues Holmes left behind and open that door. The game is bilingual in English and Chinese; letters, a diary and other documents appear in the English of 1888, with Chinese translations. It plays best in a desktop browser, with headphones.
The title plays on the two meanings of gift: a present and a talent. Adults have always dismissed Bella's talent as overthinking, until Holmes recognizes it. At the end, he leaves her a note passing on what someone once told him. The game is for children who have doubted themselves, and for Holmes fans: nearly everything in the room can be traced back to the original stories.
The sitting room and the stairs leading down from it were built in Blender at true scale. The furniture and most of the props began as Midjourney images and were turned into 3D models with Tripo, then placed and lit by script and rendered in Cycles. The web page itself has zero dependencies.
How Tripo was used
Tripo is the backbone of the room: it generated the large furniture and most of the props.
- 70+ pieces of furniture and props, including the fireplace, bookshelves, chemistry table, desk, door, sofa, clock, violin and document case: each began as a photorealistic Midjourney product shot and became a 3D model through Tripo image-to-3D. Blender scripts then placed them at true scale and lit them as one room, and Cycles rendered the four walls, close-ups and 3D push-in shots.
- A door that opens: the door was split into frame and leaf in Tripo, so it actually opens.
