Ah, finally something other than yet another Holmes game. Agatha Christie - The ABC Murders is a point and click adventure available seemingly on every platform. Poirot is my favorite fiction detective, so I was really looking forward to this despite it not having great buzz.
The core gameplay moving around in small environments and pixel hunting for objects to interact with. The hitboxes for objects aren’t great (probably due to the game targeting touch screens first), often I’d think I was clicking on say a drawer, but actually the click registered on the door causing Poirot to just walk out of the room. The game will never let you progress unless you’ve interacted with everything in a given area of 2-3 rooms. So at least there’s never too large an area to hunt for more objects in.
There’s three basic forms of interaction. You can talk to people, using a multiple choice dialogue system. Doing the interrogation badly will nominally cause you to miss out on some clues, but the same information will be spoon-fed to you via other means later, so there’s not much to it. You can examine objects which will give you new clues to work with in the deduction part of the game, or pick them up to use in stupid adventure game puzzles. Or you can trigger one of said adventure game puzzles.
Occasionally the game will prompt you to use the already gathered clues to make a deduction. It will ask a question such as “could so and so have commited the murders”, give you a palette of about 10 clues you’ve found, and you need to choose a combination of clues that provide an answer to the question. Maybe you’d choose the clues that prove “so and so” had an alibi, and was not strong enough to commit that murder. These deductions are then usable as clues for answering later questions. This system is clearly inspired by the Frogwares games, and I think actually has more potential due to what feels like a vastly larger number of clues. But it ends up being unsatisfying for a couple of reasons.
First, you can’t answer questions the game hasn’t already posed. About 2 hours into the game I believed I’d made a very important observation. I would have loved to be able to combine the clues I already had, and express to the game that I understood what was happening. But there was no way to do it. 3 hours into the game I got more confirmation for that theory, but again could just silently fume at how slow Poirot was at putting things together. And it was only at something like the 4 hour mark that a) the game made the question available, b) made the solution completely trivial by having me choose 3 clues from a palette of 6. And second, you can’t make false deductions. You’ll never need to backtrack. These issues mean there is no sense of accomplishment at all. The deduction part is totally on rails.
The adventure game puzzles are just miserable. Let me give an example. One of the victims is a young middle class woman. In her room is a table clock. The side panel of the clock can be opened up by unscrewing two of the clock’s legs. This gives you a key, and allows you to open up some other panels on top of the clock. These panels reveal some cogs. You use the key to rotate the cogs in the correct order which opens up a second secret compartment on the clock. The contents of this compartment direct you to another room. There you open up the gramophone cabinet with another key you’ve just found. Inside the cabinet you find a gramophone disc, and a mysterious paper. This paper provides the information you need to solve a symbol substitution combination lock on the other side of the gramophone table which opens up a secret compartment on the cabinet. This secret compartment contains the handle for winding up the gramophone, and another combination lock. Opening this combination lock (with a code that’s hidden in the environment no more subtly) opens up yet another sliding panel on the cabinet. Under this panel you have a button that can be used to raise the gramophone needle, which then allows you to insert the disc and listen to a 10 second audiolog.
This makes no sense in the fiction or in real life. Who would have built this monstrosity of a gramophone cabinet, and why? How can this supposedly music loving family put up with jumping through these hoops to listen to a record? How does solving something like this fit the character of Poirot? It’s almost antithetical. And let me be clear. This is not the most ridiculous such sequence in the game.
These puzzles are the only obvious padding in the game, but the overall pace of it is just so plodding even excluding them. Poirot will waddle through the scenes painfully slowly (even if you double click to speed him up). Click on an object you’ve already looked at (since due to the hitboxes you can never be sure whether it’s something you’ve seen already), and you’ll have to listen to Poirot describe the item again. Every single transition between anything is this multi-second fade to black. Answer a deduction question correctly, and various kinds of status updates will fade in and out in a nauseating strobe effect for a while while you can’t interact with the game at all, until the game forcibly transitions you back to the deduction interface for another question. Everything feels like it’s taking fooorever. This really wants to be a 2 hour game, not a 7 hour one.
On production side, the game looks amazing. The characters have a beautiful rotoscoped look, though I can’t believe they would have actually done that and it must be just really good shaders. And the environments seem to really nail an Art Deco aesthetic. The voicework ranges between bad and unoffensive, except for the Poirot which is done by someone who does a very good David Suchet impersonation. And really, who cares about the other characters :-P
While reading up on this, I found out there was apparently a 2009 Nintendo DS game based on the same book. Except there the game had an alternate “random murderer” mode, which would switch up the solution and the clues. Which sounds totally outrageous, given the setup. This is a long shot, but did anyone happen to play that one?