London Particular

Mary, Mary, quite contrary, 

How does your garden grow?

First game review of the year... I wish it wasn't this game though...

Belgian police officer Hercule Poirot is sent on a mission to London to accompany a valuable painting of Mary Magdalene on its way to a London museum where an exhibit on religious art will be held, with the Mary being the big star. He has to work with Arthur Hastings, a young insurance agent of Lloyd's who is tasked with the same mission, and after meeting each other on the ship to London, they safely deliver the Mary at the museum, in time for the grand opening of the exhibition. During the preview gala however, which has some prominent guests like politicians, theatre stars and big high society names, the Mary is discovered to have been purloined, even though it was kept in a special exhibition room which was kept locked by the curator. Hercule Poirot knows he's merely a guest in London, but can't let this crime go unsolved as a matter of honor and assisted by Hastings, he starts an investigation into the painting's theft in the 2023 video game Agatha Christie - Hercule Poirot: The London Case, available on PC/PS4/PS5/XBox One/Switch.

As the title suggests, this game is a follow-up on 2021's Agatha Christie - Hercule Poirot: The First Cases, a game I experienced as a flawed one. The game built on developer Blazing Griffin's Murder Mystery Machine, featuring gameplay where you gather clues and had to connect said clues to create mindmaps: visualizing the deduction process by having the player manually connect hint a + hint b to arrive at conclusion C. As a mystery game, it was pretty fun, but it was not really a Hercule Poirot game despite Poirot being in the title and this being a licensed game. As the title suggested, it was a prequel, portraying a younger Hercule Poirot when he was still with the Belgian police, but besides a completely wrong time setting (which I can still ignore), the character portrayed as Poirot was... hardly portrayed as Poirot, with few of his characteristic personality traits being mirrored in this younger version, save for some "grey cells" references. His mind for order, neatness and symmetry, references to interests like travelling, the way he speaks to women, his mastery(?) of English, none of these traits were visible in the Poirot in The First Cases, and I was left with a game that just felt really weird. It was with such an ambigious feeling I started with the sequel.

And unfortunately, Agatha Christie - Hercule Poirot: The London Case turns out to be inferior to its predecessor in all aspects.

The Hercule Poirot characterization is still weird, though I had expected that already. Of course, the timeline doesn't make any sense anyway if you go by the books, as the time period is a bit weird considering Poirot should probably much older, and at the very least, in the books he's about twice as old as Hastings which he certainly isn't in this game, so add to that the fact the Poirot in this game still feels far too removed from the actual character, and you still wonder why this is a licensed product. I mean, I get it, Agatha Christie in the title will sell much better, but save for the name, the story and characters really have nothing to do with the actual Poirot series...

At this point, The London Case isn't surprisingly better or worse than the first game, but sadly enough, as a mystery game, The London Case is also not nearly as engaging as The First Cases. On the surface, the game looks similar: you control a young Poirot as you question the various suspects and look for evidence in various locations ranging from a museum,to a church and backstage at a theater,  locations which are presented with an isometric point of view. The clues you gather are automatically stored in Poirot's mind as part of various mind maps pertaining certain themes ("the stolen Mary" "why is X behaving like that"). By connecting certain relevant facts in this mind maps, you're able to generate new insights or questions to ask your suspects, allowing you to progress in the game. Up to this point, The London Case isn't much different from the first game. But the critical issue is that The London Case is infinitely simpler than the first game, to a degree that it's just not enjoyable anymore. While The First Cases also simplified the gameplay of Murder Mystery Machine, I felt that was like nicely cleaning the user interface, but in The London Case, the deductions you're supposed to make are so simple and each map is so limited, you don't really feel the thrill of completing a deduction. There's never an "Aha!" moment when you make a connection, and many of the conclusion you make are often logically barely a step further than the initial hints you started out with. So the mind maps don't feel satisfying anymore to complete, and they were what made these games unique as a mystery games!

After a short prologue and the opening gala at the museum, the game world opens up as you interrogate everyone who had been at the gala, figuring out their alibis for the theft and trying to find hidden connections between everyone, but the mid-section of the game is surprisingly... dull, with a lot of walking to and from a limited amount of locations and even some fetch quests, which combined with the lower difficulty really make this game feel less detective work-focused compared to The First Cases. It doesn't help that the game's strength certainly doesn't lie in its story presentation, with sometimes awkward cut scenes where you always have the feeling like a few lines of dialogue are missing to convey things better.

I played this game on the Switch, and unfortunately, it runs really badly on the Switch for some reason. It's graphically certainly not impressive, but for some reason the loading times on the Switch are horrible, and that certainly didn't help the experience of the middle part of the game, as you constantly have to wait for the game to load each time you go from one location to another. For example: to visit the museum's curator's room, you first need to enter the museum hall (location 1), then move to a different gallery (location 2) and from there enter the curator's room (location 3), but when you want to leave, you have go back the same way, and each time the game takes ages to load each seperate location! And when you have fetch quests where you have to pick up something at location A (which might actually consists of 3 locations) and then go location B (which might be 2 locations) and then go back to A.... the game just isn't much fun to play at a technical level either, and even outside of the awful loading times, the game doesn't run really smoothly.

It's only now I even remember to write something about the story, because there was enough to complain about besides the story. As a Hercule Poirot licensed game, the consumer of course hopes to experience a tale that feels like one of the Belgian sleuth's adventures one way or another. And I guess the cast of characters feel like a Christie story, with many people in the upper parts of society and I can see a museum theft as a Poirot (short) story too, as well as some of the other developments later on, but it does miss a classic Christie twist that feels brilliant, while at the same time remaining simple. Some small thing that forces you to look at things at a different angle, but which explains everything. The London Case doesn't have that: it's a mystery story that at times incorporates tropes we see in Christie's work, and while I wouldn't call the story memorable, it's a tale that theoretically could fit perfectly with the mind map gameplay, but it's just presented in a far too simple manner in term of gameplay, while the presentation is so wonky at times you feel you're missing one or two scenes.

I did like the original The First Cases despite it not being all it could've been, so I had hoped the sequel would improve on that game, but Agatha Christie - Hercule Poirot: The London Case somehow manages to be worse in every aspect. Whereas I could recommend the first game, I would recommend you to stay away from this game unless you really want to play a video game with Poirot in its title, because as a mystery game, this game has barely anything satisfying to offer to the player.