Agatha Christie: The ABC Murders (2016)

Although this game shows some potential, it never fully delivers on the experience of solving a murder. It feels more like an interactive movie than an actual game.

At times, I selected dialogue choices with the intention of making a specific point, only for the MC to speak out in a way that conflicted my intentions. Not that it mattered, because the outcome was still the same, because there are no wrong options...

The game also has a lot of bugs/crashes. And horrible mouse controls. I'm not sure how they fucked up the latter.

So first of all, I did genuinely enjoy this game. Especially the second half when everything started coming together. I haven't personally read the original novel, but from what I've read online and from other reviews, it stays fairly faithful. I did have a few gripes about it that led me to give it 3 stars though.

The puzzles are overall not great. I enjoy a good puzzle game, and I will admit that this is one of the only point-and-click games I've played, if not the first. There were some puzzles that I had to look up, and the answer ended up being "just click this very small thing that looks incredibly similar to everything else" or "click the one thing on the desk that doesn't require you to click on it to get all the observations". It ended up being very frustrating at times. The puzzles that weren't frustrating were actually very good. Some of them were a little easy to guess your way through, and I did end up getting some of the answers completely by accident, like the hunting map. Some of the grey cell puzzles also didn't make a ton of sense to me, I just tried semi-random combinations until something worked.

The voice acting is terrible. Poirot himself has a very good voice actor, but I had a hard time convincing myself that some of these voice actors weren't text-to-speech generated. Hastings was especially awful.

It's very, very short. I can appreciate that, and with this I do think it works fairly well. Even with frequent breaks where I left the game running and having to look up certain answers, one playthrough took me 4.4 hours according to Steam.

All in all, it's not terrible. It needs a little polish, but I think you'll like it if you're a fan of mystery novels and games. Just have a walkthrough ready in case you miss the one tiny little bloodstain underneath the sink in the guesthouse like I did and the game won't let you progress until you've looked at everything possible. I'm not bitter.

Inconsistent, is the word -- from the presentation, to UI, to puzzle design, everything about this game is inconsistent. Some of the puzzles are really challenging. Some of them extremely easy (and usually these are the ones which repeat a few times, unfortunately). Sometimes the UI is very clear; push this button, this happens. Other times, the UI is extremely unclear; identify three items of note in the scene..... wait what seems like 30 seconds for Poirot to acknowledge the completion of the activity, and if you happen to hit "B" to go back, well you have to do it again because you didn't get credit.

I think that this game might have some baggage related to some sort of touch-screen platform that it may have been released on or was planned at one point, and I think that the overall experience is worse because of it. I also encountered some weird audio bugs near the beginning of the game, but they thankfully shook out after a couple play sessions.

Other than that, I enjoyed having the mystery play out, with myself as an active participant. I do enjoy mystery shows and things of that nature, but it's always more fun to be actively engaged.

Agatha Christie was a genius. I have loved every novel written by her that I read. I did not read previously the novel this game is based on so I really enjoyed trying to solve the crimes being Hercules Poirot. I suppose that if you have read it previously, it may not be so interesting because you already know the plot. Pros: Nice game. Great BSO. Entertaining puzzles. Cons: I wish it would be longer!

I had a great time playing this one.

As someone who is gradually reading all of the Christies, I enjoyed this game. The developers did a fairly good job of letting the player inhabit Poirot's world by playing puzzles that develop his thought processes. This is also a pretty faithful adaptation without falling into the trap of being too loyal to the source, and has some strong voice acting.

My big criticism lies with the puzzles, and I'm surprised some of the problems weren't caught by beta testers: for example, vaguely written directions. This is a particular problem in dialogue puzzles, where a written dialogue option will seem all right until Poirot suddenly says something awful. Other puzzles are good in theory, but lacking in execution: for example, examining people for clues that support Poirot's statements just means finding the spots where your cursor changes. And others are good at the start, but are written more lazily as the game goes on. (For example, one of Poirot's thought processes: "Is X generous?" Matching clue: "X has been described as generous." Come on, guys, at least give us a little challenge there!)

But my biggest pet peeve is that numerous puzzles require you to click on multiple places, but don't change the cursor at all so you can see that another part of the object is interactable. Which means that instead of logically solving a puzzle, you end up clicking all over the place trying to see if something changes.

That said, none of these my criticisms were insurmountable. I checked a walkthrough a few times to find the right spot to click and save myself some time, but was generally able to figure things out for myself. This is not a perfect game and it's going to be for something of a niche audience--but if you like mystery games and don't mind not having access to modern tools, this is worth checking out! Three stars out of my customary four.

If you like point-and-click mystery games, this one is a pretty good one. You can interrogate subjects with multiple lines dialog that take different approaches, and a word above the char's head gives you a read on them. Make the wrong move, and they can turn contemptuous, cold, or hostile, and refuse to answer you. You have to play to each character's personality - if they are combative, maybe riling them up and encouraging a hostile response will make them shout the answer at you. If they are sobbing, compassion and tenderness will help them open up. A lot of mystery games just give you a cold list of questions and there's no nuance to it, so I really appreciated this.

The game is less about finding physical clues and piecing it together as it is trying to understand the people involved. Even though you know certain characters aren't the murderer, Poirot still works to unravel their relationship to the victim, why they respond the way they did, etc. The puzzle is about the people, not all footprints and snagged hidden threads. (I think this is a hallmark of Poirot novels themselves, but I haven't read any)

Finding clues, making observations, and solving puzzles was a tad bit tedious, though my frustration mostly came from trying to use the PS4 controls (see below).

Some of the mechanisms were incredibly repetitive, though. For example, everytime a letter from the killer arrives, you have to analyze the typewriter style with the letters before it - which involves clicking on the same 3 letters... every single time. And you have to do this at least three times. Each time you click, Poirot has a line, and you have to sit through it, so the process gets badly drawn out.

Also the characters all walk at a painful glacial pace.

But now let's talk about the PS4 version of this game. The controls are HORRIBLE. Where you would use a mouse, you use the right toggle stick to move a cursor around on screen. Which would be fine - but the curser starts out slow and then speeds up (you cannot turn this off), so it's very difficult to point to things with any sort of accuracy. Changing the sensitivity does not affect speed up time - it just makes the sensitivity ramp up SUPER FAST after a second.

There are dozens of 3D puzzles involving turning things, dragging items, clicking on small pieces and moving them. Sometimes the pieces you need to click on are so small (the hands of a clock where you could only click on the exact 3-pixel-wide line of the clock hand) that using the toggle stick to grab them is a frustrating nightmare.

There are some puzzles where clicking the wrong part of the puzzle prompts a line of dialog that you have to hit a button to clear, so every time you miss and click something 2 pixels to the left, you are given a repetitive line of dialog that pauses your game to speak at you. I wanted to murder Poirot about the 500th time he said "the little wooden flower is preventing the wheel from turning" tHANKS POIROT I HAD NO IDEA.

I'd definitely recommend this game for PC if it's your style, but dear GOD do not play the PS4 version.

I am a huge fan of both Agatha Christie novels and point-and-click adventures. Put them both together, and I'm sold. So when Agatha Christie: The ABC Murders popped up on PS Now, I figured I'd settle in for a cozy murder mystery.

You play as famed detective Hercule Poirot in an attempt to track down a serial killer terrorizing all of England. Loads of mini-games and interrogations abound helping you to really feel like you've stepped into the iconic detective's shoes. And there is even a bit of leeway as to whether you want to play him in a canon sort of way or in a more haphazard fashion.

However, the game's UI feels incredibly clunky on the console. Poirot walks very slowly (you can force him to a brisker pace, but only with a little controller trial-and-error), and the "cursor" is slow as molasses. I also had to invert the axis for the mini games as movements felt backwards compared to other games. These things were likely not an issue on the original PC version, but it felt very obvious that this game was not originally made for a console.

The voice acting is so-so and there are times where the closed captions don't match the lines being spoken. I also noticed several words that were pronounced so badly that I couldn't blame it on Poirot's very over-the-top French accent. And the pacing of the game was a bit slow overall, but that should come as no shock to Agatha Christie fans.

In the end, I think this game would have been better served being ported to the 3DS instead of consoles. So if you choose to play this game, I highly recommend doing so on PC/Mac only. My rating would have likely been higher had I played it on a computer, but on a console it was an annoying slog. Would only recommend to those casual gamers that have the patience to deal with all of the game's quirks or who really want to pad their trophy case. Otherwise, don't feel bad giving this one a pass.