kai2: What game was your biggest surprise and... what game was your biggest disappoinment?
Recently, there were two big surprises for me, Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express and The Will of Arthur Flabbington.
TWoAF, because it's near perfect in every aspect. I don't have to say more than the glowing reviews on St. Elsewhere already do, so I'll leave it at that.
Murder on the Orient Express came as a big surprise because I was convinced it wasn't worthy of a chance. From what little I knew beforehand, I shared many of the contentions voiced in the news topic about its release. Transplanting a well-known murder mystery into our time? A possibly unrelated side-story playing in the US? An amateur detective? Introducing new characters? Bantering to modern sensibilities? This will never work; I'll never be able to play this. What did Microids think when they made those decisions?
I still decided to give it a try, and it was difficult to reconcile M. Poirot using a smartphone during the intro scene. It didn't get any better during the first half-hour of play. When a hotel guest reported a theft, M. Bouc implored his friend to lead the investigation. We entered the elevator, went to his room, and M. Poirot investigated the door for signs of a break-in, but found none. So he asked the guest to open the room. It was an automatic door, openable with a keycard. Once inside, the first thing I noticed was not the puddle on the floor, but a wall-mounted flatscreen TV. When I went into the bath, it was the modern shower that I noticed first. Every time I saw something that reminded me of our times, it broke some of the immersion.
There were many things I didn't notice, and it took almost 2 hours until layers of brilliant design decisions began to unfold. The Microids Lyon team taught me a valuable lesson: there is nothing new in this world that has not existed in the past.
I also admired the subtlety with which they visually and contextually blurred the timelines. Initially, my attention was drawn to smartphones and other modern technical appliances, so I failed to notice that the characters were dressed exactly like they would in the '30s. The hotel room, beside the wall-mounted flatscreen TV set, could have existed and looked the same way as it did back then, and vice versa. On the train, there was a modern kitchen, spotlights, and other things, reminding me that it plays in our time, but again, they were there but no longer noticeable for me. It was different when all I knew was what I had seen on the scant number of screenshots.
The portion in which I got to play Joan Locke during her side-story investigation was littered with modern stuff, from SUVs to computers. Even this was not a complete break with the more subtle approach taken before. That's because, while SUVs didn't exist in the '30s, the architecture of a certain place I got to visit did.
Playing Joanna Locke, the whole side-investigation idea, as I've already mentioned, was one I thought was one of the more questionable decisions. After walking in the shoes of M. Poirot for a good length of time, it felt like a breath of fresh air because it allowed me to relate to someone, to look at things from her perspective, to draw my own conclusions about people and items and how they are relating to each other. The Microids team even had Joan express what I was feeling while playing M. Poirot. It feels more like connecting the little dots for him, only to hear him brag about how smart he is, but never like I was drawing some brilliant conclusions that enabled
him to draw the right conclusion. He knows it all and knows it better, and when I make a mistake, there was always his "No, no, no!" to remind me of it. During this side-investigation, it became clear that it's not as Microid's initial press release suggested, something optional, but in fact interwoven with the greater plot.
Going back to an earlier part of the game, where M. Poirot arrives at the station platform, this was the point where two
new characters were introduced to me. This was a moment of laughter because I recognized immediately who they were based on. It was only after finally entering the train that I was beginning to understand [one of the many] misconceptions about Microids' intention and what they
actually did versus the purpose of doing it. They have not, in fact, introduced any new characters—be that as it may, both are from our time, and if you watch certain TV shows, you can't fail to recognize them, but they were assigning roles to bit parts, who may well have existed in the original plot.
Once on the train, during my first observations and listening in to conversation of the other passengers, things and topics have been mentioned, with the potential of triggering negative reactions. Since I don't spoil anything with it, an as yet unknown female character, visibly upset, mentions to another that she has to get to Paris to help refugees. While I can only speculate about Microid's motivation here, I do think that it's to highlight Mrs. Christie's own work in that regard. Despite being a contented topic of our time, this is no rallying cry, and without extrinsic motivation, it is well within the plot and in the context of the original timeline. Another passenger mentions electric cars, and contrary to the belief that they are new, the first model of such cars was already built in the 1840s. That's to the extent of it.
It's important to ban the thought that this is some sort of agenda, as
is the case with games whose designers are making a point with a sledgehammer, instead of using the canvas to weave a plot, in which it is only natural to talk about things, and in context with their imagined world. And that's both sad and unfortunate for Murder on the Orient Express, where you would automatically be reminded why others are doing it, to send a political message to the brain-dead and uneducated mass of like-minded followers, instead of accepting it as part of the story without jumping to the conclusion that they [Microids] are also only just jumping from the same bridge.
With that said, Murder on the Orient Express is
not free of political messages. On the contrary, it conveys
the most important message I can think of for our and any time, culture and people all over the world One, that does not even have to be mentioned, if you are an open-minded person, knowing that sticking to the past to identify what someone did to someone else, or currently does, doesn't outweigh what they once stood for and many people are still standing for, that's inherently good. And of course, as with all the rest Microids did, they are relating it in character, and in exactly the same words as can be found in the novel, true then, true now, and in many contexts.
In summary, I can say that Microids did the original story justice. Every part, including the side-story, fits together like puzzle pieces, to form a whole. Joan, as both her own agent and a stand-in for M. Poirot's helper Hastings, was believable, and once past and present begin to blur, it becomes an immersive experience and fun to reenact the murder mystery.
Not all of it was good; the puzzles were nothing to write home about, the observations are in part guesswork unless you know a person's age because it was mentioned in the novel, while occupation and nationality are learned while listening in to conversations or talking to the characters, and it could have done without the superficial search for mustaches.
I'm glad that I gave it a fair chance, even though it was not easy early on; it felt all the more satisfying after finishing it.
