Agatha Christie – Hercule Poirot: The First Cases

Genre: Graphic Adventure

Players: 1

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Review:

In the history of fictional literary detectives, Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot is one of the most renowned and famous, often mentioned in the same breath as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Edgar Allen Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin. However, as famed as he is, we haven’t seen many games to focus on the character, with developer Blazing Griffin being one of the few to focus on the character. In The First Cases, released in 2021 on PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch, we see Poirot at a time before the stories, starting in the detective’s early days as a member of the Belgian police.

The presentation here is mostly pretty good, with some nice detailed 3D characters and environments and decent shadows and lighting. This is backed by subdued atmospheric music, and solid voice acting for all characters, with Poirot himself sounding fittingly refined and professional, with writing that does a good job fitting in with Agatha’s Christie’s style, including common phrases like Poirot’s talk of his “little grey cells”.

When it comes to the gameplay, you’ll find yourself in various crime scenes where you must interview witnesses and suspects and inspect the area for clues that could help you to figure out what happened and who’s responsible for the crime. In addition to gathering this evidence, you’ll be connecting dots in a literal sense in menus representing the evidence, trying to piece them together where they’re related to gain a better understanding of the case. Doing so will give you more deductions to connect, as well as new topics to talk with witnesses about. And in addition, for some witnesses you’ll have multiple choices to determine the best way it might be to get information out of a reluctant witness.

While this is all good in theory, it runs into multiple problems in practice. The connections you form on the charts you’re constructing are not always clear. Sometimes two clues that seem directly related won’t let you connect, and other time two clues that seem only loosely connected must be attached to each other to proceed. The game does thankfully highlight the correct clues to match after a few incorrect tries, but it’s still frustrating that it often feels like you’re guessing what the game wants from you rather than putting together the clues yourself.

Another problem is that areas you’re investigating don’t have hot spot indicators for places you can interact with until you get close, making it easy to miss a vital clue. What’s more, the game does a poor job letting you know when you’ve found everything in an area, and sometimes you’re instructed to do something without being told how. In one early part of the game, you’re told you have to distract one character to look at the room they’re in without them watching over you, but you’re not given any indication how to do that. As it turned out, I needed to find an object I missed multiple rooms over, match it with other items on the clue grid thing, then discuss it with another character who would react in a manner that just happened to provide the needed distraction. Nothing in the game indicated this was what I needed to do to progress, I had to look up multiple guides online before I found what I was missing.

As if all this guesswork wasn’t bad enough, Poirot moves around at a snail’s pace, making looking for clues or even walking back and forth between multiple characters to speak with them an agonizing process. And every time you enter or exit a room, you’ll have to wait through a frustrating loading screen. When you’re searching an entire area with numerous rooms trying to find that one thing you missed, this can get excruciating.

It’s really unfortunate that Agatha Christie – Hercule Poirot: The First Cases has all of these problems, because the writing and presentation is all quite good, and it would have been nice to see the gameplay up to this level of quality. Unfortunately, the gameplay flaws make this a terribly frustrating experience, and as a result I can’t recommend this game when multiple better detective games exist on the Nintendo Switch. At least not unless you’re a huge fan of the Agatha Christie character.

tl;dr – Agatha Christie – Hercule Poirot: The First Cases is a Graphic Adventure that has players solving crimes as the famous fictional detective. The story and presentation here is all very good, but this game is filled with flaws and frustrations that make it tedious to play, from a lack of hot spot indicators to a dreadfully slow walking speed. As a result, unless you’re a fan of this character, you’re better off getting a better detective game.

Grade: C+

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