I have grown to love the Agatha Christie games. I’ve always enjoyed a good mystery, and both The ABC Murders and The First Cases were great adaptations of Agatha Christie’s work. Hercule Poirot’s work is never done, yet The London Case makes me wonder if the famous detective might need a vacation.

In Agatha Christie – Hercule Poirot: The London Case, you play the titular detective as he finds himself embroiled in a new mystery. This time, the mystery that developer Blazing Griffin presents is an art theft, and it will take all of Poirot’s little gray cells to untangle the threads of this mystery.

As in previous games, The London Case plays like an interactive, point-and-click detective game. This is similar to Frogwares’ Sherlock Holmes games, as you have a mind map to connect various clues to make deductions. Additionally, you can find and examine items throughout the environment, some of which can be used to uncover further clues. A good example of this is blush powder being used to dust for fingerprints.

At certain points you’ll also have to interrogate (or simply converse with) suspects and NPCs, who all have unique personalities accentuated by voice acting. Luckily the voice acting is good since the print on the subtitles is incredibly small. The text in general is small, which becomes an issue at various points during gameplay.

The options menu is bare bones and doesn’t give you much more to work with than a Subtitle toggle, volume sliders, and the ability to delete your save. In 2023 the fact that a narrative-focused game doesn’t have multiple text sizes (at the very least) is somewhat sad. It also doesn’t help that the character animations during dialogue are sometimes incredibly bad and don’t even try to sync up the mouth movements with the audio.

Another annoyance with The London Case is the fact that Hercule Poirot walks incredibly slow. Some of the areas you’ll explore are relatively large, and traversing one end to the other (sometimes more than once) gets to be frustrating. If I wasn’t already invested in the story and didn’t already enjoy what I was playing, the walking speed and poor animation might have killed the experience.

I feel somewhat conflicted about Agatha Christie – Hercule Poirot: The London Case. The story is solid, the characters are well-voiced and written, and the gameplay itself is fun. Sadly, with the short run-time, the animation bugs, and the lack of simple quality-of-life options and adjustments, The London Case feels like a step backward.

If you are an Agatha Christie fan, I’d pick this up on sale. If you’re new to these sorts of games, I’d go for one of the previous two Agatha Christie games instead, then circle back to this one later if you enjoy them. This isn’t the worst mystery game I’ve played, but it definitely isn’t the best that Blazing Griffin and Microids have put on show.

A Nintendo Switch review copy of Agatha Christie – Hercule Poirot: The London Case was provided by Microids for this review.

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Agatha Christie - Hercule Poirot: The London Case

$29.99 USD

4

Score

4.0/10

Pros

• Intriguing Puzzle Gameplay
• Interesting Storyline
• Well Voiced and Acted cast

Cons

• Very few options
• Text can be hard to read
• Character animations can be buggy
• Slow walking speed
• Short runtime