Agatha Christie - Hercule Poirot: The First Cases Reviews

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Overall I enjoyed it although it has that annoying thing where the deductions that the game wants you to draw often make no sense in the moment.

I usually love Sherlock Holmes games but wow, this one is the worst. Shockingly bad movement, interface, characters. Feels like a $2 dumpster game. One I can only suggest you skip.

My partner and I play these kinds of games together and we both had a lot of fun with this. It was the first Agatha Christie game we've played and we're hooked now.

I'm a huge Agatha Christie nerd so this game was fun for me. It reminded me a lot of Clue too. The action is glacially slow and there's sooooo much talking but I still had a good time with what it was. I would have liked to be able to interact with the game more and maybe do some puzzles to figure things out but it was basically a game where you moved to different (gorgeous) rooms and talked to different people. There were multiple chapters and a few mysteries to solve. I recommend for other fans of Christie and Hercule Poirot!

'The First Cases' is a moderately interesting detective game, without really requiring any detective skills. The player is very much railroaded the entire experience, and making errors has no meaningfully apparent downside. This results in more of an interactive movie experience rather than an investigative game requiring any real detective work. This might initially put some people off, but I found the game to be enjoyable despite these flaws. Poirot is a fun and charismatic character, and the voice acting in the game was solid. Putting facts together was fairly intuitive, though some connections did not make much sense to me. The mystery itself was interesting enough, though the setting was not as memorable as some in the more well-known Poirot novels and films. And the payoff at the end was mostly satisfying. As with many games in this genre, the player is forced to walk around; I wish there was an option to move around more quickly, but thankfully the environments are not too large so it doesn't waste too much time. I did really hate being gated in certain areas, though. It takes away from the game when you are prevented from walking down a set of stairs for no valid reason. Having no chapter select means that if you missed an achievement or simply want to revisit somewhere, you have to replay the game from scratch. Overall, this game was fairly interesting, and if you're a fan of Poirot or mystery games, I'd say worth playing. If you can look past the flaws, and the several quality of life features missing, you can find something here worthwhile. It does, however, fall short of what I would expect considering the abundant source material. 6/10

Very wordy, not much to do beside point and click but otherwise a charming 10 hour story. Previous similar games I've played were the Sherlock Holmes games also on Steam but those had much more to do besides clicking on an object or two before a five minute conversation with suspects. I'm downloading the London Case now, I'm hoping they've beefed up the gameplay between the two.

My partner and I just finished playing through the game, we very much enjoyed the cosy experience it gave and were surprised how good the story actually was. The voice acting is excellent (and I'm annoyingly picky) especially the man himself who sounds spot on as a young Poirot. It's also mostly voiced, which is very impressive for such a game. The only things not voiced are general letters you find and Poirot's inner thoughts. People talk about the 'mind map' style deductions as being overly simple or having confusing answers. This is true to some degree but we quickly learnt the best way to tackle these to get the most out of the experience: 1. Whenever you get a new piece of information, check your mind map. You will have a little notification to check and the notification will clear when you come back out. This way when you have connections to find you will always know it must be one of the new points. 2. Do the working out. Yes you might have gathered that A gets to Z, but read what Poirot says or asks and that will help you to follow the correct path to the solution. 3. Connections are 90% of the time close to each other. There was only two times I believe that a connection crossed over a line, they are generally placed in a way that makes the whole map neat and organised. The only real negative for me is that there is an awful sound whenever you move forward a dialogue box, this meant we had to play the entire game without sound effects. This only became apparent twice when we were meant to hear a loud noise, but it was obvious what had happened. I would suggest in future the UI and Ambient sound effects being offered as separate bars in the menu. Overall we enjoyed the game far more than we were expecting from the reviews and found the ending very satisfying which is hard to do in a mystery game!