Agatha Christie - Hercule Poirot: The First Cases

I picked up this game because I generally like Microids games and love a good mystery and Agatha's work. Overall, it's a solid title but only if you enjoy JUST simple adventure game. The story puts you in the shoes of a young Hercule Poirot. He gets invited to a lavish, remote mansion for an engagement party with the wealthy Van den Bosch family. A sudden snowstorm traps everyone inside, someone gets murdered, and you have to dig through everyone's dark secrets to catch the killer. From there, it's all about interrogating guests and uncovering thier secrets. The art style is pretty nice, though the top-down perspective took a bit of getting used to. My main problem with the gameplay is that I expected more actual searching and investigating. ;// The deduction system is extremely easy, which might disappoint you if you're looking for a real puzzle-solving challenge. The upside? It makes for a very easy 100% achievement completion. I really liked that you can go completely at your own pace. It took me about 10 hours to finish because I only played a couple of chapters a day. I was enjoying the atmosphere and just didn't want to rush through it. The voice acting was surprisingly g…

the game is monotonous and the gameplay is constantly the same, quite boring unfortunately. The most frustrating part though, is connecting the clues in the mind map. Nearly half of the combinations make absolutely no sense and leave you frustrated because there is no objective way to know two seemingly random and completely different points are connected.

If you are a fan of H.P. series or any other detective theme game or show, I highly recommend this game, The graphics are beautiful, UI is well designed, music is well suited and beautiful, and most importantly the story and the pacing just keep you wanting to play more. Well done.

I found the system of making deductions a bit pedantic at times, with some connections not really making any sense. The gameplay is also quite slow when it comes to the resolution - you as the player realise all the facts fairly swiftly but the game forces you to take all the baby steps rather than being able to make the deductions you want to. So by the end it was quite tedious, especially with the replication of Poirot explaining the crime to the other characters - while this mechanic works in the books because Agatha Christie held back some of Poirot's thought process, in the game, because you have to do every step of his thought process, the denouement cut scene (and the fact it cannot be sped up or skipped) was very boring.

It's fun, but not a particularly difficult solve. It is actually such an easy solve that sometimes I had problems realising what they wanted me to connect, since it was so [i]obvious[/i] that it was confusing that I needed to connect them at all. Eg. something saying "character A helped character B", and then another saying "character B was grateful for character A's help". We are talking this level of obvious. And since there are many clues, you will try many many times to skip over intermediate clues since you don't really need to connect the easier ones to know what is going on. Fortunately at some point the clues you actually need to connect glow a bit so then you realise you first need to get the intermediate clues for that. One other thing that frustrated me was that there are a couple of instances in which if you investigate some random stuff, it kicks you out of the scene before you can finish investigating. As a methodical every-item investigator, this locked me out of an achievement (thankfully someone uploaded a save game so I could still clock it in). The story is good though. Wish I would've gotten information about what happened to [spoiler]Florette after the prolog…

i wish they make the character moves faster.