I tried this instead of attempting the Cathedral Ward. Not that great, too long and uneven, too French. read the book or play The Last Express instead.
What’s good
environments are classy, Poirot’s apartment looks suitably indulgent. the art style is fine, trying to evoke the art nouveau that would have been popular in a period-attentive manner (set in 1935). voice acting is substantial, critical for a Poirot experience to hear his fussy French-Belgian accent
the climax is an incredible experience, as the game slowly leads you to the murderer’s identity with enough clues that you can be a step in front. but…
What’s not so great
the plot is a finely-crafted thing, but it’s entirely the product of Agatha Christie’s incredible skill. all the good dialogue bits? Poirot’s debonaire fussiness? the final sequence slowly & gracefully enlightening you? all from the book
the animation and modeling is average to crap. there are a few mini-game activities, one is Observation (discerning a character’s mood from their appearance, finding hotspots on their model). Here’s the first one:
see the middle hotspot? when detected, it’s labeled as a slight smile. there’s other instances where a hotspot is uncovered as Clenched Fists while showing clearly-relaxed hands. similarly, when talking to characters, their reaction will appear as a subtitle floating nearby, instead of acted via animation
there’s a few systems in the game: walking around, point-scoring (ego points for acting in the Poirot manner), hotspot hunting (Observations, on characters and scenes), dialog trees (interrogations and Reconstructions of the events of each murder), sliding/rotating puzzles (Thinking), and (once you’ve found the necessary clues) set-making (Deductions, to prove/disprove a conclusion). none of them work that great.
I played on a console, so walking was the normal L-stick; R-stick was to move Poirot’s focus of attention, to find the next interactable object. but the focus would snap back to Poirot’s location if you stopped nudging the stick. so trying to be efficient & moving the focus to an object while also moving Poirot to bring it in-shot was largely useless. clearly this was designed with the mouse in mind
the scoring sounds fun, but I don’t have a great internal model of the Poirot nature. is he a bad cop, manipulative and intimidating? is he a stickler for what’s right and proper? is he a theorist, leaping from sparse clues to dazzling conclusion? I have no idea. I can say with confidence is that he is vain, since preening his moustache in every mirror grants 3 ego points.
the dialogue trees got me the most mad. when conversing, the characters’ reactions would float next to them. but often what the word said didn’t match the reaction. COLD would appear when the character answered a factual question simply. and the choice prompts in the reconstructions were very poorly written. for the first murder, the killer laid a railway timetable book face-down near the body, when reconstructing the events, the prompts for when the killer produces the timetable are PUT/TURN AROUND. turn around? no, the killer didn’t turn around. oops, wrong answer! but as a native English speaker, I know ‘turn’ implies rotating around the upright axis, and to rotate the top to the bottom is ‘turn over’ or ‘flip’. getting a reconstruction choice wrong would reset it, and you have to start again from the beginning
there’s a couple of other bits that annoyed me. the game opens with a lengthy cutscene, grants control to the player, take 3 steps, next cutscene. and the tedious dialogue for attempting to leave an area before interacting with everything quickly becomes grating. why bother with letting the player move between scenes when they have no choice?? you are forced into deductions as soon as all the clues are gathered, so the game has no qualms about taking agency away
for some reason the deductions for the climax have a brightly-lit background behind the white text explaining the deduction, making them extremely difficult to read!
the multiple separate systems is an interesting idea, but they felt unpolished when I played. I think with a little more attention to how the player would experience them they could have been pretty good. the scoring was complete crap. it’s there to encourage replaying the entire game (to choose the correct response for all conversations), but that’s a 4-5 hour affair. in my opinion, it should have been dropped OR a way to replay a section should have been added.
The Last Express is the superior Agatha Christie-inspired game: similar art style, copious voice lines, shorter, better writing, more accommodating to the player missing things, just as infuriating close-up puzzles. play that instead