Agatha Christie - Hercule Poirot: The First Cases

Dumb logic connections, forced to watch long cutscenes that just replay the information I theoretically had to deduce. Forced to walk around scenes back and forth. Nice visuals. No subtitles (that I could find)

I played this game for about 8 hours in 2023, but it frustrated me too much to continue. I came back determined to finish it and, to be honest, I should have just left it alone. There are parts of this I quite enjoyed. The characters are interesting and the voice acting is well done. Large parts of the plot are intriguing and engaging, though the ending wasn't the sort I generally enjoy. The problem with this game was, unfortunately, the gameplay. Like many detective games, this uses a mind-map system for solving the mysteries and, like many detective games, it has its issues. There is a particular layout to the mind-map that, once you spot it, makes 'solving' things more a question of connecting literal dots than figuring things out. This can be something that you ignore or work past, but what annoyed me most was that often I would have to make what felt like obvious and unnecessary connections in order to get to the conclusions I had already reached. One key instance of this was what made me drop the game 3 years ago. As a story, it's perfectly fine. As a game, it falls short.

(SPOILER! )The game is fine the mechanism is a bit tedious but ok. However Poirot was not a law and order guy, he was a people person and would have handled a lot the situations very differently, with manners or so to speak. Also he would not condemned a case of justified self defense like it was some bad thing. He is always graceful and cares about true justice. I dislike how this story makes him out to be some ordinary police who goes around shouting 'the law the law'.

To be honest - I thougt that this game was made at least 20 years ago. Design of the characters looks exactly like in old games - it may not be a big problem, however animations are just awfull. In many dialogues, characters do not open their mouth and locations become all blurry. Also the plot... the plot is interesting at some points, but characters are flat and dull; investigation process doesn't exist, grey cells mechanism is really confusing. You cannot explore all locations whenever you want, you can investigate only one particular location at a time. It is more like interactive novel than a game.

An overall nice experience, with cool dialogs and characters. If you find it with a good discount (i.e. 70%) this is a gem. Otherwise wouldn't bother at full price unless you are really really into detective story games. The mind tree is a pretty cool system.

[b] "Redicule Parrot: No Need to Read" forgets that writing is imperative for detective games. I will keep playing but seriously? At one point I skipped all conversations, open the "mind palace" (so original), and easily solved the "puzzles". How? well, here's a hint: they placed the nodes that you should combine in such a way that the lines don't cross each other (mostly). So I literally just searched for the nearest nodes that use the same nouns and... Done... Sad. Really. Agetha deserves more than this. From wimp the keen: Even wimps redicule Hercule. [/b]