I enjoyed the game a lot, right from the beginning. The first scene has a fun dialogue between hung-over Kathy and her over-eager nice-but-weird college roommate Eileen, and it bode well for the game. The game is a typical point and click adventure, with a very simple interface - you click on something and can then choose whether you want to look at it, think about the item (useful for further clues) or use it further (open, talk, take etc). You have a bag with an inventory, the items of which can be used as in every other adventure. All well-known stuff. The graphics look very old-fashioned, but the backgrounds are nicely done, as is the voice acting. Another reviewer compared it to the Blackwell games and the looks are very similar. The charaters are interesting and well created. The story starts well - supernatural twist, family secrets, town secrets - and it's great fun to investigate it. Investigation is done the usual ways - talk to people, examine locations and documents. There is a fun bit where you have to use a photo editing and a voice recognition program on the computer (the story takes place in 1993) and in total, I liked the mix of investigation methods and the step by step revelation of the story. The tasks are mostly logical, sometimes they were a bit too easy for my taste (especially all tasks relating to the very gullible young policeman in the station and his tendency to coveniently not pay attention in crucible moments), but then I prefer this to overly annoying riddles in some adventures, and there were also some tasks which had me wondering at first. So basically it's a mostly easy-going adventure, with a focus on the story, and this is exactly what I like. The story developed in the promising way, but the end was a bit too weird for me. Nicely executed and original, just not completely my case. Still, in total, I very much enjoyed this game, found it a bit short, but great fun and would buy the next in the series if there will be one.
I was already prepared for this game being more of an interactive story than a real adventure. It is true, there is a tremendous amount of hand-holding in this game, every task is listed, the riddles are not very difficult (and often of the mechanical kind, which I personally don't like). Still, as I was prepared for that, it is no big problem for me - I take the game as a relaxing interactive story. Unfortunately, it is not a very user-friendly game and so I don't enjoy playing it much. First, the good things - the voice acting is enjoyable, the graphics are out of date but still nice to look at. There is a feature of Poirot being able to draw conclusions from looking at people or places. A very nice idea, but here the bad execution starts. Basically one moves the mouse until the cursor changes from a white circle to a smaller green circle, which shows that one of the relevant objections was just made. A bit too easy. When talking to someone, words next to the person show that person's mood - it would have been nice if there were some clues to the mood that one could find oneself. So these two features don't add much to the game. They could have been much better executed to result in a real addition to gameplay. However, my main issue with this game is the tedious controls. I also have the added problem that my mouse lags when playing (I don't have this with any other game), so every action involving the mouse is slow and so fun. Add to this the unpleasant controls and mechanisms. For example, in order to compare two letters, one has to click onto one letter, point out something, click out, click onto the other letter, point the same thing out, click out and so on. Why not put both letters next to each other and just click similarities? Why are the letters not in the inventory but require tedious walking to the desk with many clicks? Everything takes longer than needed and it's not enjoyable. Pity, it could have been a good game.
