Agatha Christie - Hercule Poirot: The London Case Critic Reviews

Agatha Christie – Hercule Poirot: The London Case is an engrossing mystery brought to life by realistic graphics, well-executed music, and stellar voice acting.

Take the previous chapter and improve it aesthetically, adding the right ideas to make a very good game now much more than good. A precise and refined narrative, together with a cleaning and optimization of the maps as well as the game models, give a certainly interesting quality to this new digital iteration of Hercule Poirot.

Agatha Christie - Hercule Poirot: The London Case is an enjoyable but improvable narrative and adventure game. The biggest shame is that in several respects it is a step backward from the previous chapter, mostly in design and presentation choices. The story is dense with twists and turns and you are always in doubt about the innocence and guilt of all the characters, but the pace at some stages drops a bit too much and the setting does not fully convince.

Agatha Christie - Hercule Poirot: The London Case tells a good story starring the detective Hercule Poirot, who although younger than his moustached and experienced version is equally shrewd, intelligent and charismatic. The supporting actors and the plot work, brought to life in various and detailed locations by a valuable visual and artistic presentation, net of cutscenes that are not as well cared for. Unfortunately it is precisely in the playful dimension and in the rhythm that the experience loses some points, because sometimes it dilutes the progress too much with lots of backtracking and puzzles with a not exactly intuitive solution. In any case, the title of Blazin Griffin has what it takes to make the fans of the iconic character born from the beloved mystery writer happy.

The London Case is a successful detective story. Linear, relatively short, technically uninteresting. But we still have a case worth to play.

Hercule Poirot: The London Case is a mixed bag for fans of Agatha Christie and adventure games. They will be thrilled to put the little Belgian detective through his paces once again, but the mystery itself doesn’t fully satisfy.

Playing through Hercule Poirot: The London Case can be a reasonably pleasurable experience for fans of Christie's works, as the writers at Blazing Griffin carry the torch with respect. For every area where the game succeeds, however, it features an awkward limitation or stumbling block to match. Not every mystery game can be Return of the Obra Dinn or Screen Rant's 2022 GOTY Pentiment, but it's a bit of a shame that the deductive experience of Nancy Drew titles outdoes the Belgian detective's own process. Agatha Christie - Hercule Poirot: The London Case is another gesture at what a great Poirot game could look like that ultimately misses the mark.

The London Case occupies a strange sort of middle ground — it wants to facilitate player freedom, while at the same time telling a focused point-and-click story with little room for deviation. Perhaps it would have functioned better as a more pure narrative experience – a visual novel, for instance. It certainly would have been easier to avoid the technical hiccups in that case!

Agatha Christie - Hercule Poirot: The London Case is a graphic adventure with all the original atmosphere of Agatha Christie's novels and an interesting mystery to resolve.