Agatha Christie: Hercule Poirot - The First Cases (2021)

This game had a lot of potential. Unfortunately, it didn't quite do it for me.

The deduction mechanics were nice, matching clues in a mindmap web of sorts in order to advance the story. The case itself was also interesting and very true to a Christie work, imo.

That said, I had a few irks that are more nitpicky for Poirot fans, which I honestly let slide in the scheme of things and didn't factor into my rating of things. Still, worth mentioning...this isn't Poirot. The character design is so incorrect that I could cry. There are also a few moments where he says or does something that is just not something he would say/do. One could boil it down to this being a younger Poirot, but it still is jarring sometimes. Especially the ending. It's a huge smack across the face of canon Poirot.

Overall, it was entertaining for the time that was had. However, the replay value is zero, which was a big factor in my rating. There's no "missing" clues or alternative ways to play things. You are on rails and you must find it all in order to advance. There's no choices to be made here; you are along for the ride. And while that's fine, it doesn't exactly allow for going back to the game in the future.

This was never going to be a masterpiece of a game, but the potential to be a decent game was in there and it was just never quite chiseled out. It doesn't help that it seems either things got cut/rearranged at the eleventh hour and references to them weren't fixed, or somehow I missed some important plot references, so when Poirot began casually referring to some things in exposition, I was left going "wait, what? When did we talk to that character and learn this...?"

Going off story and characters alone, I would have rated it a little higher. It's a decent little mystery that did a good job of employing the Dame's tactics of having half the fun being figuring out how all of the characters and their secrets pulled together in her tidy little web. I could see the story being a novel she wrote, though it wouldn't be one of her strongest. But the lousy save system and clumsy gameplay really dragged the score down. The mental maps were an interesting idea, but put together in a way that was often very convoluted, and often more frustrating than actually pleasantly challenging.

Two out of my customary four stars.

1.) Not thrilled with the save system. Apparently I had a couple things left to investigate in a room, but went through them in the wrong order, so the game automatically progressed me to the next scene and autosaved. There's one autosave file, no manual save option, and no cloud storage. Aside from this being very annoying, it also seems like a great way to piss people off if the single file is lost or corrupted late in the gameplay.

2.) Really raising my eyebrows over having an engaged upper-class couple sharing the same bedroom in a story set after World War I. That's an anachronism that pushes my suspension of disbelief past the breaking point.

I purchased this game on the Nintendo Switch when it was on sale. I'm always looking for some smaller games to play that pique my interest: this one knabbed me with an Agatha Christie murder mystery.

I don't think this is a terrible game, but I also don't feel like it's a good one. Especially given the opportunity to do something very cool with a Hercule Poirot mystery, it fell short of any hopes I had for it.

At times I felt the 'mind map' connections didn't make sense, were linking two items together that I thought had already been established, created a link that truly was not necessary at all and felt thrown in. The thought behind the game mechanic itself is pretty cool but I wish it had been thought out better.

There were... quite a few bugs in the graphics and cut scenes. There were also a few spelling and grammar mistakes in the dialogues, which unfortunately for this game pulled me out of it.

As far as detective stories go: The characters were strong and interesting: I enjoyed the voice acting and actually I don't recommend playing without it as it at least made the playthrough more interesting. I will admit that despite my critique of the gameplay itself, there was a point where I had trouble putting it down. This kind of story tends to do that to me: I really want to know what happens. I wasn't disappointed in the ending. It didn't wow me, but I didn't hate it either.

Overall, I wouldn't recommend it. I think there must be better games worth the time.