The next game I decided to play out the door, from my PS4 collection, was "Agatha Christie: The ABC Murders". It's a point and click adventure, that admittedly is slightly better suited to the PC/MAC mouse than the PS4 controller. I watched the BBC adaptation of the story, with John Malkovich, not that long ago, but half remembering the plot didn't detract from the solid, if perhaps moderate enjoyment I gathered from the game.
Hercule Poirot receives a letter informing him that a murder will take place. The murder of Alice Ascher does occur in the village of Andover and a copy of the ABC rail guide is left by the victim. A second letter arrives, and a second victim, Betty Barnard who is killed in Bexhill. Seeing the pattern, Poirot tried to determine who the killer is before much more of the alphabet is crossed off.
It is, as I say, a fairly standard point and click adventure. You can control Poirot with the left stick and interact with objects using the right. Items are picked up and examined, sometimes there are physical puzzles that need to be resolved, crime scenes are investigated, and you piece together the events by connecting clues, or facts, in the "little grey cell" sections. To say that it's a mystery it does actually work quite well, and there are a variety of subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) ways of pointing you in the right direction of progressing the plot.
Visually it's reasonable, it's a got a thick edge comic book style of animation which certainly does the job. The vocal performances are quite so good though, Poirot himself is OK, but a lot of them seem like someone trying to do an impression of an area's accent, rather than hiring someone from there specifically - I'm suer that this was reflected by the games budget.
So, it's reasonable. I think I finished the game in four two hour or so sessions and that felt about right as the actual actions of the game are relatively repetitive and the games length stopped that from wearing out it's welcome.
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