Agatha Christie – Hercule Poriot: The First Cases centers around Hercule Poirot’s early days as a young detective. Let’s find out if this is a game worth playing.
Agatha Christie – Hercules Poirot: The First Cases you start off as the young Hercule Poirot minding his business when suddenly he gets summoned to the Van Den Bosch’s mansion. A theft has been reported and now it’s up to the detective to find out who did it.
This is the prologue of the game and it teaches you the ropes as to how the game works. Investigations start off with a request from a person. You can then talk to that person to get an idea of what the crime is about.
Hercule will then investigate by inspecting the surroundings of the scene of the crime. Each new discovery that will be related to the crime will then be registered in his Mind Palace. The Mind Palace is basically Hercule’s mind where he keeps tabs on each of the information that he gets.
Once he gets enough information and clues, you can then go to his Mind Palace to start linking ideas, clues and information. This is the core mechanic of the game. With all the clues laid out for you, you must figure out which one of them relates directly to the crime and which ones are just red herrings.
At first you would think hey anyone can do this. This is such an easy game that you can just link each idea to each other. Unfortunately, it’s not as easy as it seems and is actually what frustrates me with the game the most.
The ideas and clues may seem very obvious as to what needs to be linked to what. However, it seems it’s not really following any sort of logic. There are clues that I feel that it doesn’t make sense at all why you should link them. The game even thinks it’s so obvious that you should link them when they do not.
I would end up doing trial and error linkings hoping that that idea is related to this idea. And so it becomes just a matter of choosing the odd one out rather than thinking logically and methodically for the answer. And this is what you need to deal with for the rest of the game, as there doesn’t seem to be any other mechanic in place.
The characters that you meet are uninteresting and some are even forgettable. A few stand out but not enough for you to get any kind of sympathy for any of them. I do think the game handles the notion of how society treats you based on social standings very well. But I don’t think this is enough for me to be emotionally invested with the game.
In the areas that you are investigating in. You can zoom in and zoom out of the map area. This is cool and all but I feel like this isn’t enough to help you investigate every nook and cranny of the area. The camera is fixed so you can’t rotate it to see what’s behind every corner. The bad part is there are things that are hidden in corners that you can only really investigate once the button prompt shows up.
When your character is investigating the area, he walks. Like sure Hercule, have a stroll all over the place while a crime is happening. He might as well crawl. This makes every moment in the game feel so slow that I feel like I’ve been playing the game for ages when it should have just taken me 5 minutes. I wish there was an option for me to make him walk faster at least.
Overall, I do believe the game is interesting at best if you just want to challenge yourself and become a detective but this is not how I envisioned myself as a detective. Agatha Christie – Hercules Poirot: The First Cases is a good game but you’d have to really be into this detective stuff if you want to give it a chance.