Posted on: October 28, 2023
Vyralas
Games: 18 Reviews: 1
Fun but rough
First, to get it out of the way, I'm talking about the game from the perspective of someone who hasn't read the novel so I can't comment on accuracy or how well it has been adapted to game format. The game is overall fun, it's not just talking to people and solving discrepancies between testimonies but it has a myriad of small puzzles. If you get stuck you usually get 2 - 3 hints which usually progress from "hint" to "here's the whole solution" so if they're not your cup of tea, you can essentially skip them. That said, they're a big part of the game so you'd borderline be playing it as a visual novel if you choose to do so. The mystery itself was interesting, though I suppose that's to be expected. I found the new detective to fit well into the story without feeling like she got shoehorned in. I enjoyed the fact that they let you manually deduce almost everything, down to a bunch of minutia about other characters' profiles. But since it's a long, linear story, it's impossible to actually fail a deduction. If you click the wrong one, you just go "Oh, no, that's not right, try again". You don't even get to see anyone make a snarky remark about how dumb of an accusation you just made. Visuals are fine for a low budget game like this where characters moving is not the focus. Voice work, however, *is* a big deal and it's... bad. I can only describe it as them sounding like they got zero direction and winged it based on what the script said. Some of the accents are also VERY over the top. I experienced only a couple of small bugs that got fixed on restart - my mouse staying on screen after I finished a puzzle and Poirot being stuck in slow-mo after a certain conversation. My biggest frustration is that you can't skip dialogue unless you've heard it before. Poirot loves to state and re-state stuff you've already heard, it gets old. So, probably not worth the 40$ price point. I'd love to support low budget games but I don't think I can give this more than a 3.
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