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.

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.

Homicide Trinity

Something old, something new, 

something borrowed, something blue

Time to use the rarely used short shorts tag again! Many years ago, I thought I'd use the Short Shorts corner to collect multiple, unrelated short reviews and other observations in one single post, usually when I felt I couldn't fill out a full post about one topic. But I seldom use the tag now, as I often just give up on writing a post of something if I feel I can't write a full post on a subject. But as the topics of today are all games and they kinda form a nice contrast as they tackle the idea of a mystery game in different manners, I guess I can use the tag again now...

The Mysteries of Ranko Togawa: Murder on the Marine Express (2021) is the first entry in what is planned to be a series of mystery novels on PC by Spanish developer 1564 Studio. The titular Marine Express, no relation to the Osamu Tezuka animated movie, is a newly developed submarine train connecting California with Japan. The elite St. Joachim Academy for girls has booked seats for its classes on the maiden voyage of the Marine Express, offering their (rich) students an opportunity to learn about marine biology during a one-of-a-kind school trip. However, not long after they have left California, the unexpected happens: the body of one of the teachers of St. Joachim is found in his compartment, stabbed to death. The main suspect is a student whom was rumored to have been in a relationship with the teacher. Ranko Togawa and her bestie Astrid however think there's more to this crime, which seems confirmed when more attacks and murders occur in the running underwater train. Everyone is locked up with the murderer inside the running Marine Express until they reach Japan, so it's up to Ranko to quickly find out who the killer is.

I think it was the title that first caught my attention of this visual novel: the name "Ranko Togawa" reminded me of Edogawa Rampo of course, and I think the Marine Express animated movie by Tezuka is pretty neat (the adaptation in the GBA game Astro Boy: Omega Factor too!), so it was only natural I decided to try it out. This game is a relatively short kinetic visual novel, meaning there is no real gameplay and you're just reading the 2-3 hour long story. As a mystery story, it's presented fairly competent, though the plot is not incredibly surprising: a lot of the twists and turns will seem somewhat familiar because they don't vary much from the known tropes of the genre. There's a PlayStation game released only in Japan titled Murder on the Eurasia Express (1998) that has a similar story setting, with a murder occuring on a long-distance train with female students of an elite school, and because of the similar background story, some of the story beats in The Mysteries of Ranko Togawa: Murder on the Marine Express do remind of Murder on the Eurasia Express: I guess this is a result of both games making use of similiar 'building blocks' so it's not strange they'd end up with similar story ideas too, but because of that, I had a pretty good idea of what was going on early on. I also thought it was a shame the idea of a closed circle situation in an underwater express felt underplayed at times. After a few fish-related jokes at the start of the game, you don't really get the sense anymore this is a train running at high speed underwater. The game is split up in various scenes and chapters, and just having short cut scenes/'eye catchers' that show the train moving underwater and perhaps an Indiana Jones-style map showing the current location of the Marine Express in the ocean wedged between the story scenes would've sold the setting much better. I did love the graphics, music and the writing of this game though. The pixel art of this game is fantastic, and the slightly larger-than-usual sprites really make the characters come to life, and the banter between the colorful cast of characters is quite enjoyable too. There's also a group chat that is updated occassionally for some extra (optional) dialogue to read, though players who want to focus on the mystery can choose to ignore that. The core mystery plot of The Mysteries of Ranko Togawa: Murder on the Marine Express will probably not surprise more experienced readers of the genre, but it has a lot of spirit and I'm definitely interested in seeing more of this universe.

I assume that most Western mystery readers became acquianted with the exploits of the Chinese magistrate Di Renjie through the Judge Dee novels by Robert van Gulik, but van Gulik isn't the only person who has written detective fiction based on this historical person. Detective Di: The Silk Rose Murders is a 2019 PC game developed by Nupixo, and like van Gulik's writings, involves a highly fictionalized version of Di, a young magistrate who is appointed to become the head criminal investigator of the capital Chang'an by Wu Zetian, the first and only empress of China. He is put personally by Wu on the case of the murder of Linfei, a woman who was strangled and whose heart had been cut out. The previous magistrate had tried to pin the murder on the victim's father, but the empress suspect there might be a political plot behind this to weaken her (still fragile) hold on the Dragon Throne, so she wants Di to investigate thoroughly. But while Di is investigating the case, more women are killed in Chang'an and the mysterous killer leaves threatening notes and roses behind at each scene, signalling a crazed killer is on the loose.

Detective Di: The Silk Rose Murders is basically the complete opposite of The Mysteries of Ranko Togawa: Murder on the Marine Express in terms of gameplay. The latter was a kinetic novel, where you could only read, Detective Di: The Silk Rose Murders on the other hand is an old-fashioned point & click adventure, where you search for pieces of evidence on the screen and talk with various witnesses and suspects to piece the crime together. The game is about 3, 4 hours long and with only a few simple inventory puzzles and one or two parts where you might have to pixel hunt, it's also not a challenging game, but it is quite enjoyable. While Detective Di: The Silk Rose Murders utilizes a minimalistic graphic style, it works surprisingly well to create a historical Chinese setting (which is one you don't see in games often anyway!) and the story is also quite unique, making full use of the specific historical background. The prologue for example focuses on an international scandal when a Korean ambassador is killed during treaty discussions at a Chinese manor, while the main game does a great job at really making you realize you're playing a mystery game set in the time of Wu's rule. Each chapter is bookended with a segment where the game tests whether you made the right interpretation of all the evidence you found up until then, and while these segments are far from difficult and basically only checking whether you were paying attention, the presentation is quite good and help make the player feel like they're really solving a crime. Definitely one to try out if you like van Gulik's Judge Dee novels!

Murder Mystery Machine is a game originally released for mobile platforms in 2019 in episodic format, but the complete "first season" was released on PC/PS4/Xbox One/Switch in 2021. In comparison to the previous two games, Murder Mystery Machine is the game most focused on letting the player solve a crime themselves. In this game, the player takes on the role of Cassandra, a rookie police detective who is assigned to the District Crime Agency as the partner of Nate, who makes it very clear he doesn't need a partner and especially not someone who just graduated from police academy. Their first job is the investigation into the death of a local politician who was gaining momentum lately. After solving their first job succesfully together, Cass and Nate slowly learn to know each other better as they get to work on more cases, but their investigations also lead them on the trail of a big conspiracy and it seems the only persons they can trust, are each other. Or not?

The presentation is the first thing that stands out in Murder Mystery Machine: each episodes is divided in several scenes, and each scene ("location") is basically an isometric diorama and you control Cass as she interrogates witnesses and searches each nook and cranny for clues. Each diorama is in 3D and you can turn the scene around to look at the scene from a different angle, sometimes revealing evidence that had been hiding behind a blind spot initially. This reminds of a game like Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker, which had some brilliant puzzles that revolved around the player turning the level around and looking at it from various angles. In Murder Mystery Machine however, the idea basically remains the same the whole game: sometimes something is hiding behind a blind spot and you're only able to see it if you turn the diorama around, but that's it, the way this idea is used in the first episode is the same way they use it in the last episode. These dioramas look great though and the presentation remains great start to finish. You finish a scene and move on to the next once you have obtained all the neccessary evidence/testimony and answer the core questions of that scene. This is done via an interesting deduction board mechanic.

You basically have all the relevant information on post-its, which you are free to organize any way you want. By linking related nodes with lines, you're able to generate new insights or questions. For example if you have a node about a pistol, and a node about a body that was shot, you can connect those two pieces of information, leading to a new insight that the pistol was indeed the murder weapon. Or you can also connect contradicting information, like A claiming B can vouch for their alibi when B denies such a thing. Connecting those pieces of information would allow you to confront those two people with your new insight. Eventually you'll arrive at certain 'big' nodes, which allow you to answer the scene's main questions like "Who is the main suspect" or "Who has a motive for the murder". While it is required to answer the main questions correctly in order to move on to the next scene, the game doesn't actually punish you when you make incorrect connections between nodes: it will not say that connecting node A and B is unneccessary or punish you for that. This means that if you have a good idea of what is going on, you can keep your board pretty neat because you'll only make the necessary connections between the nodes, while someone just guessing will have a horrible mess of a board, with countless of lines connecting one node to another. Depending on the scene, you'll easily have thirty, forty different nodes which can all be connected to each other, so things can become very cluttered with lines if you are just guessing and not making deliberate connections between nodes. The game can be confusing though, with nodes that have similar information, but you're required to connect specific nodes even though the other node basically says the same. I played this game on the Switch by the way, and organizing your board can be rather frustrating with a controller (and for some reason the Switch touchscreen can't be used!). This gameplay mechanic probably works really easy with touchscreen or mouse, but it's unnessarily complex with a controller.

The game has some replayability as it rewards you if you can find all the relevant connections in each scene (you don't need to make all the necessary connections between information nodes to answer all the main questions in each scene) and the game does become more difficult with each case, as you accumulate more and more information, making each board much more complex due to the possible numbers of connections. The cases themselves aren't very complex, but I like how the game really makes the player make all the deductive connections themselves, allowing the player to make each logical step themselves instead of being a passive experience. The plots of Murder Mystery Machine are often fairly straightforward, but even so, they do make you feel like you're really a detective yourself as you yourself have to connect all the relevant facts to arrive at the right conclusions. The eight episodes are connected through an overarching storyline which develops in a rather predictable manner to be honest, but as an overall package, Murder Mystery Machine is an enjoyable detective game, especially for those who really want to be working on a puzzle themselves.

Developer Blazing Griffin Games is also working on a Poirot game coming out in two weeks by the way, so I'm definitely going to check that one out too!

So a short post this time, with short write-ups on short mystery games.  The Mysteries of Ranko Togawa: Murder on the Marine Express, Detective Di: The Silk Rose Murders and Murder Mystery Machine were all quite different as mystery games, and they all had different things to like about them. I guess I might as well ask the other gamers here if there are mystery games they have enjoyed lately, or whether they are looking forward to a certain title? I already mentioned the upcoming Poirot game, and I still have to find time/money to get me the new Shin Hayarigami and perhaps Tantei Bokumetsu... And if you have played any of the games discussed today, what were your thoughts?