Monsieur Poirot is looking you up and down
If there’s one thing I cannot claim to be, it’s an Agatha Christie or Hercule Poirot fan. However, I am a fan of investigative point-n-click adventure games, particularly ones set in the past, so I thought I’d be the right person to take a look at Agatha Christie’s The ABC Murders. Unlike Tom Clancy there’s a reason Agatha Christie’s in the title, which is that it’s actually based on one of her novels. The game from developer Microids is actually out next month, so let’s see how it’s shaping up.
The story starts nice and mysteriously. It’s June 1935, and detective Hercule Poirot and his Dr Watson-like friend Arthur Hastings receive a typed note from someone calling themselves “ABC”. The note suggests that ABC will provide them with an interesting and potentially unsolvable case, starting on the 21st in Andover, UK. Indeed, when the 21st comes they receive a summons to Andover to investigate the strange murder of a shop owner named Alice Ascher, where the murderer has left an ABC train schedule behind.
I got to play most of the Alice Ascher investigation, a small but juicy chunk that took me about an hour to get through. And it must be said, I enjoyed what I played. The game as mentioned is a point-n-click adventure, a 3D one with an actually pretty lovely cel-shaded style. The interface is very straightforward, elegant and almost Telltale-like, just featuring an Options button and a roll-out Actions button showing off your Objective, Notebook and Clues.
As Poirot, the player explores the crime scene and local area - in this case, Ascher’s Tobacconists, the outside street in Andover, and the fruit stall run by the annoying and unhelpful woman next door who I personally accused of being the killer even though I knew she wasn’t. That’ll show her. Anyway, while exploring instead of just looking at everything and talking to everyone more often than not Poirot will only focus on things relevant to the case at hand. While this may infuriate adventure game purists, and I admit I was a little disappointed at the absence of amusing things to see, it’s both more realistic and makes for a quicker, more streamlined experience.
Are we at the murder yet?
Not that I’m suggesting that The ABC Murders is kind of a “My First Adventure Game”. There’s still plenty of puzzles to get stuck into, although they’re not so much the “scour the environment and find useful items” variety you see in most regular adventure games. There’s only one of those in here and it’s probably the weakest point in the demo - it took me so much by surprise that I got stuck for the only time in my playthrough. The rest of the time the puzzles were actually a little more Professor Layton-like, where clicking on an interesting person or object would pop up a specific puzzle related to them.
These take several different forms. Some just require looking at specific places and finding useful clues, such as the murder victim and seeing one undisturbed pool of blood and no signs of a struggle in the surrounding area. “Observation” moments also happen when Poirot is questioning characters and you have to observe their body language to match the detective’s theory. This is cute, although sometimes it’s also brain-dead obvious, such as one moment where Poirot thinks “this woman appears to be a smoker” and to support this you have to look at the lit cigarette in her hand. Hopefully this’ll get more complex and interesting as The ABC Murders continue.
Alongside the Observations are the “Thinking” sections, which are the straight Professor Layton-esque puzzles. Often these are object puzzles. The screen zooms in on the object and you has to rotate, prod, and closely examine it to unlock the secrets hidden within. It might be a chest with an unusual lock based around pictures of birds. It might be a box with sliding sections that reveal buttons that must be pushed in a particular order. Or it might be a cash register that requires the pressing of three specific keys to unlock a secret compartment containing a key to the backroom that the police would’ve have access to anyway or Alice Ascher should’ve really kept on her at all times. I didn’t say they all made sense, but the puzzles are fun.
The scene of the crime!
Finally once you’ve worked out everything Poirot gets to work his Little Grey Cells (seriously, they’re called that) and piece together all the clues he’s gathered to answer certain questions. These include “was theft the motive for the murder?” and “what time was the murder committed?”. When all these questions are answered that’s when Poirot and Arthur Hastings get together to do a Crime Reconstruction, which would’ve been fun if it didn’t require restarting the whole damn thing when I placed a book the wrong way round.
In general I actually really enjoyed the short period of time I spent with Agatha Christie’s The ABC Murders. It may be more straightforward than my usual adventure game tastes but the old-fashioned detective-ing, the cool cel-shaded graphics, and the classic story I haven’t actually read has me surprisingly looking forward to Microids’ effort. Really the only complaint I’d level would be at the voice acting. Poirot and his French accent can just about get away with his stilted speech, but everyone else sounds like they’ve never experienced emotion before. This may be The ABC Murders’ Achilles Heel, but crap voice acting won’t put people off a good adventure - just look at Daedalic’s success. Ahem.
Putting all the clues together, I have deduced that Agatha Christie’s The ABC Murders will be released February 4th 2016. Hopefully it won’t get murdered before that.
Most Anticipated Feature: Getting to experience the B and C murders!
