The Baited Trap

"I, Hercule Poirot, am not amused."

"The Hollow"

So this game was released earlier this week, but for some reason the price of this game in Japan is just a third of the MSRP in Europe, selling for just 1500 yen instead of 35-40 euro...

An earlier encounter left an impression both on Angeline van den Bosch and Hercule Poirot, a patrol officer of the Belgium police force, so when Angeline found herself in trouble, she decided to write to now Detective Hercule Poirot, hoping he would be able to help her. After the death of her father Viscount van den Bosch, Angeline was raised by her mother Cassandra and while there had been financial troubles in the past, the illustrious Van den Bosch name seems to have regained its place among society, and the upcoming marriage betweeen Angeline and Gedeon Demir will only strengthen both families and their social status. However, Angeline has been receiving blackmail letters threatening to reveal a family secret unless she pays. She has no knowledge of any hidden secret and her mother also denies everything, perhaps too strongly even. Other socialites have been receiving blackmail letters too, so it might indeed be nothing and just an attempt to get money out of her, but worried, Angeline invites Hercule Poirot to a private party to celebrate her engagement with Gedeon at the Van den Bosch estate. Poirot makes his way through the heavy snowfall to the manor, where he meets various family friends and business acquaintances who all seem to be hiding more beneath their superficial pleasantries. But Poirot has barely started his investigations into the blackmail matter when the British Major van Hagen, an old family friend of the two Van den Bosch women, is found stabbed to death in his study, with the weapon missing. With the phone lines also down because of the heavy snow, it's up to Poirot to find out who murdered the Major and the crime's connection to the blackmail letters in the game Agatha Christie - Hercule Poirot: The First Cases, released in 2021 on PC/PS4/PS5/MacOS/XBox One/Switch.

I am not absolutely certain, but I think this is the first game based on Agatha Christie's famous Belgian detective Hercule Poirot that is not an adaptation of an existing novel, but a completely original story (there have been official licensed Poirot books by new writers of course. Like the title suggests, this game is actually a prequel, set in the times when Poirot was still a police officer in the Belgian police force and long before he had to move to England because of the Great War. It's a period the original stories don't talk about that often (most notably the short story The Chocolate Box), so in theory, it's an interesting period to set original Poirot stories and I guess origin/prequel stories in particular are popular. I wonder whether it's a coincidence that this game's release window is pretty close to Frogwares' (far more ambitious looking) Sherlock Holmes: Chapter One, which is another prequel game based on a famous fictional detective...

Agatha Christie - Hercule Poirot: The First Cases is created by Blazing Griffin, the studio that also made Murder Mystery Machine, a game I wrote about a few weeks ago and which also features a character named Cassandra. Huh. The gameplay and mechanics of Hercule Poirot: The First Cases are a clear sign of this pedigree, as it is quite close to Murder Mystery Machine in design. You control a young Poirot as you question the various suspects and look for evidence in the rather spacious Van den Bosch manor, which is presented with an isometric point of view (unlike Murder Mystery Machine however, you are not able to change the angle of the camera). Relevant information/hints/evidence are are all memorized by Poirot in his brain, and by using your little grey cells, the player has to find connections between relevant pieces of information to bring order among the chaotic sea of information. All the information you gather is automatically organized in so-called "mind maps", which gather all the relevant information pertaining to a certain goal (for example, all the information on the blackmail affair is stored in the "blackmail mind map"). By connecting certain relevant facts yourself on this mind map, you're able to generate new insights or questions to ask your suspects. Connecting two contradicting statements from two suspects allows you to press both characters further on that point for example, or you might uncover a motive by connecting a seemingly innocent mention to a character's past to another fact you learned. People familiar with games like Frogwares' more recent Sherlock Holmes games or Gyakuten Kenji/Ace Attorney Investigations will feel at home here, as do the people who have played Murder Mystery Machine. As expected of a licensed product however, Agatha Christie - Hercule Poirot: The First Cases plays a lot more streamlined than Murder Mystery Machine, and personally, I liked that better. The mind maps are already organized in an easy to read manner this time, allowing you to focus more on the actual thinking rather than struggling with dozens of posts-its. Each information point also has a short description, which really helps a lot with conveying what the context exactly is, as Murder Mystery Machine only had the words without any descriptions. And each mind map in Hercule Poirot: The First Cases shows how much connections are still possible to make and shows what actions you haven't followed up on yet (you migh have generated a new question to ask someone, but not done that yet). 

The mind maps are still quite enjoyable as a mechanic that allows the player to really follow the logical process of the detective and it works especially well with a character like Poirot, who prides himself on order and method.. Because the player has make the logical connections themselves and everything is visualized in a clear manner, you do really feel like you're piecing the case together yourself. There are also some other minor gameplay moments where you need to coax a suspect in revealing information by using different questioning approaches (some people fall for flattery, others need a bit of pressure), but you'll be spending most of the game eyeing the mind maps trying to find the correct connections. Sometimes, the connections can be a bit frustrating to find (why do I have to connect *these two* nodes, instead of the other, similar-looking one?), but the game never punishes you for getting things wrong on the mind map,  so you can brute-force yourself through them.

As a mystery story, Agatha Christie - Hercule Poirot: The First Cases covers familiar ground in a fairly competent manner. The story reminds a bit of Murder on the Orient Express, with the Van den Bosch manor is snowed in, a surprisingly international cast of characters and even the murder mystery plot takes some minor cues from it, while some themes touched upon even remind of Agatha Christie's work in general While the game does a good job at letting the player make all the logical connections themselves and I'd say that ultimately, the mystery plot, while not really original, is perfectly servicable, I would say that the set-up for the second half of the game is rather clumsy: the game will try to present a plot twist halfway through that is supposed to serve as the driving force for the plot of the second half of the game, but is introduced in such an awkward manner it basically gives the whole story away at that point. Simply shifting around when certain plot points or pieces of evidence are introduced to the player would have resulted in a much more interesting detective story, while now the game basically reveals its hand by just dropping all its cards on the table for a second.

But there is one thing where Agatha Christie - Hercule Poirot: The First Cases drops the ball hard, and while it wouldn't hurt any other game, one could almost call it a lethal mistake here: this game doesn't feel like an Hercule Poirot game at all! We're supposed to play a younger Hercule Poirot and sure, he has a moustache and he does mention his little grey cells, but that's it! Nothing about the character in this game, nothing about the writing in this game besides "his little grey cells" and the name indicator that says Poirot, would make you think you're playing a game based on the Poirot series. Not a single remark about his moustaches, never mentioning his love for symmetry or wanting to tidy things up: if you'd just look at the character's lines without any names, you'd never know this was supposed to be a young Poirot. And it's not like there are no opportunities to do so in a natural way. In a scene in the library, you examine some books and Poirot mentions his love for travelling. Why not sneak in a reference here that he'd love to visit Egypt some time? Why not some sly remark on the English and their food when he's speaking with the British characters? Why no funny remarks about a brother when he's talking with Gedeon about his brother? There's nothing that even feels remotely like Poirot here. Earlier this year, I played the game adaptation of The A.B.C. Murders, which as a mystery game was inferior to this game, but at least it had little details that made you feel like Poirot, like having Poirot curse when he walked through a puddle or being able to click on every mirror in the game so Poirot would check whether his clothes were tidy. 

I'm also rather confused about the time period this game is supposed to be set in. Given that this game is about a young Poirot in the police force who is still not very famous (save for his shooting incident), you'd expect this game to be set around the 1890s, but it feels like it's at least one or two decades later, considering the style of clothes of the characters as well as the style of furniture. References to "the war" involving the English army which every Belgian apparently knows about confuse things even more. The writing certainly isn't trying to actually sound like it's set around that time (and at times, it just sounds like... 2021), which doesn't help things either.

So Agatha Christie - Hercule Poirot: The First Cases ends up being a very strange game. It is quite enjoyable as a mystery game that focuses on the logical steps necessary to solve the crime, and while the story and setting don't feature anything remarkably original, the end product is a capably made mystery game that does a good job at making the player really feel like they are piecing the mystery themselves. At the same time however, the game does not do a good job at making you feel like the titular Hercule Poirot. In fact, if you're somewhat familiar with the character and the books, you might end up like me, wondering constantly why the game is so intent on not feeling like a Poirot game. The license doesn't seem to do anything at all: from a pure story and gameplay POV, I can't say the game benefits at all from the Poirot license, while at the same time, the game does nothing to interfact meaningfully with the character Poirot and the many stories featuring him at all. It's a trap very few games based on existing licences fall into: ending up as a game that would have been better without the license. So curiously enough, I'd say that Agatha Christie - Hercule Poirot: The First Cases is an interesting detective game, but it would have been more interesting without the Agatha Christie- Hercule Poirot in the title.