Agatha Christie - Hercule Poirot: The London Case

I will recommend this game, as I honestly had fun playing it. It's a fun game to play on a rainy afternoon, if you buy it on sale. I certainly don't recommend paying full price for it. The unskippable opening credits right after the prologue were annoying. It didn't add anything to the story, other than showcasing the key creators. It could have been added as a proper cinematic instead. This is just an annoyance, as it doesn't really impact the gameplay itself. When we're talking gameplay, the controls are very clunky. Items/actions often have an icon, but require you to click somewhere else entirely to activate them. Besides that, the mouse often just moves to a whole different part of the screen. And then there's the constant waiting while Poirot's walking into a door or a painting for over 10 seconds before he actually completes the action you want him to complete. Often requiring you to make him move away and back again before the action actually completes. The graphics are mostly fine, though there have been moments where there were shadows flickering over parts of the characters, and moments where mouths of speaking characters were not actually moving. Otherwise, I found the cartoonesque style of the game quite charming. The puzzles were not overly complicated. Most of them were quite simple. And because you can't make 'wrong' deductions (the game simply tells you they are not correct, and lets you try again), and you sometimes can't even leave a location before looking at everything, the whole game just guides you towards the finishline anyway. It's not possible to draw a wrong conclusion and accuse the wrong person, for instance. The story itself was interesting enough, but in my honest opinion, the twist and secret motive that are usually so strong in Agatha Christy's work, were very far fetched, and lacked in depth. It came across as a good story being told by someone who's very bad at telling stories, and is forgetting half the details. Basically, there's a lot wrong with this game. It's certainly not as polished as one would expect. But it is entertaining.