Earlier today I finished Agatha Christie: The ABC Murders, a game I picked up last week on a whim. It’s a very safe murder mystery adventure game starring Hercule Poirot, which actually scores you “ego points” if you act like the famous fictional detective. Having zero knowledge of Poirot, I scored less than half of the 600 available points.
I’ve played a fair number of adventure games, but none of them were truly murder mysteries, and I need to correct that because I love the format for it. I call this game “safe” because it 1) adheres very close to a Telltale-style presentation and mechanics, and 2) is impossible to mess up. The game is unfortunately completely linear, guiding you to the correct conclusion even if you pick the wrong dialog option and halting your progress until you piece together the correct clues.
There’s a “deduction mode” where Poirot combines clues to draw conclusions, and before each segment starts he says “now let us get our brain cells to work” in his cute Belgian accent that grows less cute after the 10th or 20th time. I was also disappointed that the game kept showing the murderer in cutaway scenes, spoiling the mystery, except this person also turns out to be a red herring, so the game is deliberately trying to fool you? The ending twist lands kind of flat so it doesn’t really redeem the game giving the audience more info than the protagonist.
Not sure I’d recommend, but I did find myself compelled to see it through, and it was cheap on PSN. If you folks know any other good murder mysteries on PSN, I’m all ears.