Agatha Christie – The ABC Murders (PS4)
Besides the obvious top dogs that are Arthur Conan Doyle and his creation Sherlock Holmes, Agatha Christie’s detective fiction featuring Hercule Poirot is perhaps the next most famous in all of literature, and as such, there have been quite a few attempts to adapt her works into video game form, this PS4 game not even being the first go at turning The A.B.C. Murders into one.
For those unfamiliar with the story, The A.B.C. Murders involves famed Belgian detective Hercule Poirot receiving a strange letter while living in his new flat in London. A murderer is hoping to make a game of their upcoming kills, telling Poirot in advance which city the next murder will take place in and on what date. With no name of the victim given though, Hercule Poirot tries to solve the mystery as soon as possible to prevent the murders, the detective quick to notice a pattern where the victims being killed have names that line up with the letters of the alphabet. The murderer is clever and certainly careful in how they leave the crime scenes to make things difficult for Poirot, but Hercule is an intelligent and keen fellow, knowing when to lie to get information and quick to notice unusual details others might miss. As a piece of crime fiction, the battle between the anonymous killer and the storied private investigator works well, but its translation into a detective game isn’t as clean as one might hope.
Most of your activities in Agatha Christie – The ABC Murders are investigating the scene of the crime after the latest murder and interrogating anyone who might be associated with the kill, but right out of the gate there is plenty we know about the cases we’ll encounter whether or not we’ve read the original work. The letters coming in advance of the kill mean that not only are they premeditated, but they are also done by the same individual. Thus, when we turn up to the scene of the crime, one the killer even leaves a railroad schedule book at as their calling card to make it clear it was them, there are plenty of answers already assumed, but we must still investigate as if there aren’t any. It is certainly thorough detective work to ask anyone who could be the suspect some questions technically, but doing something like interviewing the first victim’s drunk husband as if he was a suspect certainly feels like the busywork it pretty much is. The structure of the game can make you feel a bit powerless with the inevitable deaths you have no chance to prevent, as you certainly aren’t given enough information in the early moments to prevent the upcoming ones and a truly meaningful lead takes a while to appear. However, your time in these early investigations is thankfully not totally fruitless, some of the details being reincorporated much later in sometimes clever ways, but even with that reassurance things can still feel like they lack the proper weight a smaller mystery might have. The satisfaction of things coming together is delayed a bit too long, meaning the interactive side of this detective story is struggling to fit the plot into a structure that usually does well when a game with multiple mysteries to solve along the way.
The mechanics involved in an investigation would work better for a game that didn’t hinge so hard on one central mystery, but the developers do the best they can to fit the story into the game’s design, even adjusting the plot a little to fix up some of the stranger moments from the original novel and others expanded to allow more gameplay moments or choices. Most cases will involve the player taking control of Hercule Poirot to walk around a crime scene, making observations to help him piece together the events that took place. Some clues are just out in the open and easily observable, but every now and then you might encounter some small puzzle that requires a bit more interactivity. Some are simple such as finding the right item to open something, but every now and then you might encounter puzzle boxes, complex mechanisms that don’t really have a good narrative justification but might be the most interesting brain teasers in the game. With very little guidance you’ll be presented with something like a chest or wardrobe that will require you to tinker with its pieces to try and figure out how to open it. These can involve trying to uncover themes in its decorations, identifying unusual parts of the device, or arranging cogs or designs properly, and while it doesn’t make much sense why so many people in Britain have such contraptions to hide vital clues in all the time, they are well designed puzzles. If you’re struggling with any of them, the game does give you a hint system that builds up over time, Hercule taking an automatic action to move things along if you chose to use them.
While finding evidence and surveying the crime scene is important, so is speaking with suspects and people who know the victims. Before speaking with them though, you can try and get a read of them, Hercule looking for subtle clues in their appearance, posture, or behavior to better determine how to approach them and if they are suspicious or not. The problem with this is that the game’s graphics aren’t really up to the task of showing such subtleties. While the game’s cartoonish art style does make the game clean and nice to look at, the character models don’t really have the fine details the game seems to imagine they do. A character might be said to be clenching their hands when they appear at ease, wearing disheveled clothes when it doesn’t look much different from what others are wearing, and perhaps the worst case was when Hercule Poirot is trying to see if a girl’s grief for her dead relative is genuine and the visual clues actually seemed to suggest it wasn’t. She had no tears as she cried and her face was oddly stiff, but according to Hercule, she wasn’t faking it at all. Luckily, these segments can’t really be failed, you just hover a cursor over certain areas and Hercule does the detective work himself, the player essentially pushing through it rather than doing any hard investigative work.
Speaking with characters is thankfully more interesting and involved, as you get to chose how Hercule asks the questions to get to the truth. Being direct and honest doesn’t work with everyone, and although your partner Hastings might object to it, there are moments where it’s better to lie or be aggressive in your questioning. Here the personality reads you get can help you, and people will clam up and not give you certain details if you approach them incorrectly. This can lead to some oddities where you might not get a certain detail the game expects you to acquire through an interview, some characters starting to refer to a man by his full name all of a sudden despite my line of questioning never getting that information for example. It’s only really with those small details does the game fail to accommodate the results of your line of questioning properly, but there’s another small aspect that occurs during the interviews, that being the accumulation of Ego Points. If the player manages to behave in-character as Hercule Poirot throughout the course of the game, they can build up these ego points, which are both a joke at the expense of Hercule as he can earn them for grooming his mustache in a mirror or being a bit self-aggrandizing, they are also meant to inflate your ego a bit for acting like the famous detective properly.
Once you have gathered enough information, Hercule will put his little gray cells to work, a segment where you are asked a few questions and need to pick out the clues that lead to the answer. You are given clues both irrelevant and important, some questions able to be answered before the game forces you to do it to progress, but there’s a small hitch to the design here. While there is no punishment for picking the wrong clues besides needing to swap them out and try again, the questions asked sometimes can be a bit vague, and the same can be true of the clues. Mostly the questions just might be a bit too broad, allowing you to interpret them to apply to more of the clues, but much like getting a read on people, you can eventually make your way through without much trouble just because the interaction is basic enough. The vague language can be a bit more annoying in the other form of problem solving, that being when Hercule Poirot will work with his assistant Hastings or police inspector Japp to reconstruct the events of the murder. Here, you’ll watch a scene play out, it stopping and the player needing to chose what action will happen next, but the options are sometimes very plain words. People will be walking and you might need them to advance to the right spot where the murder took place, but their walking distance in a scene isn’t guaranteed, so you might have to start over if you advance them to the wrong spot. Other times, you might get really odd phrasing, such as the game having one where the option is to appreciate, the game not really specifying what is being appreciated and making it an odd choice for advancement. There’s also a scene that involves a lady abruptly deciding to use her belt as a scarf instead that seems hard to surmise. Like the little grey cells and reading a character, you’re bound to eventually get through it despite the flaws, but if the detective work isn’t satisfying mechanically, it’s certainly not going to pair well with a plot that makes the work unsatisfying narratively.
THE VERDICT: Agatha Christie – The ABC Murders is not the way you should experience this particular Hercule Poirot story. While working well as a suspenseful crime novel, the design of a serial murderer who calls their kills in advance robs the enjoyment out of much of the detective work the player will be doing in the game, especially since the investigative design of the game is a bit sloppy. Interrogating people is interesting to navigate and the inexplicable complex puzzle boxes you find require some involved puzzle solving, but putting the clues together often involves vague phrasing and requirements that complicates what the player has already figured out and areas with potential like getting a read on a person by observing subtle clues are ruined by being more about ticking boxes off the game’s checklist than your real active involvement. The strength of the original narrative means that the game is still interesting, but The A.B.C. Murders is just not a good fit for the detective game design featured here, the small flaws only made more glaring by the fact the plot delays any results to your efforts for so long.
And so, I give Agatha Christie – The ABC Murders for PlayStation 4…
A BAD rating. As mentioned, the plot being adapted is both the strength and weakness of this game, and while The A.B.C. Murders may have hope in video game form, it’s not through a by-the-numbers detective game that doesn’t adjust itself well to accommodate a plot with such a distant resolution. The enjoyable twists of the narrative can give the game some energy as things finally do come together, but the early portions of the game make you feel just as helpless as Poirot does as he can’t get the results he needs to make any progress, a helplessness confounded a bit more by the investigative design not always being congruent with a normal line of thought or the game’s mechanics such as clue wording or visual tips. The issues in design are of course finding out what the player should be doing as the plot progresses, with some of the highlights being odd things like the puzzle boxes but other moments being dry busywork because you know they’re pointless even if you don’t know how the story is going to end.
Still, Agatha Christie – The ABC Murders is also not the worst way to get the plot of the original. The story still works well and has the expected highlights of detective fiction present. The gameplay sadly is a distraction from that more often than not and delays gratification more and more in a story that already holds onto its juicy details until the late game. It’s faithful to the original, perhaps to a fault at times, but it’s just not well constructed in the ways that would make a good game, meaning even Christie’s plot can’t keep it from being underwhelming.