Agatha Christie - Hercule Poirot: The London Case Review (Switch)

The Agatha Christie Poirot games have a long and mixed history. They go right back to PC games in the early 2000s and continue through to the likes of The ABC Murders, which also made it to Switch back in 2020. Over the years, different developers and publishers have picked up the Christie brand and delivered a range of different experiences. Hercule Poirot: The London Case is the latest, the second effort from developer Blazing Griffin and publisher Microids, following 2021’s Hercule Poirot: The First Cases.

Like The First Cases before it, The London Case is set before Agatha Christie’s earliest Poirot stories, continuing the chronicle of Hercule’s journey from rising star in the Kingdom of Belgium’s police force, to his fall from grace and stationing as a provincial policeman, to his increasing fame as he unravels one confounding case after another. Although there is some continuity, there is no need to have played the earlier game to follow the story. As the game opens, Poirot is travelling to London to safeguard the transportation of a painting that will be displayed at a museum. We need hardly say that the painting doesn’t stay hanging on the wall for very long, and Poirot finds himself investigating a seemingly impossible vanishing act.

The game has you control legendary detective Hercule Poirot directly, moving around in a third-person perspective using the thumb stick and examining things with the 'A' button. At times, you drop into a first-person view to explore an area in more detail. The camera also drops down into the scene to show characters engaged in dialogue, and a final aspect of the game shows Poirot’s mind map, where you must puzzle out connections between pieces of evidence you have discovered.

As an original story, the game doesn’t need to square the circle of providing something new whilst being grounded in a well-read classic like Murder on the Orient Express or The ABC Murders. However, it does carry the burden of needing to come up with an Agatha Christie-style Poirot tale out of thin air. In this regard, it is a mixed result. The requisite cast of characters with different social standings, hang-ups, and flaws is certainly present and correct. An early puzzle tasks Poirot with matching each character to a painting in the museum – a smart way to get the player to internalise who’s who.

However, where the best Poirot stories create a web of motives and relationships between all the characters and their connections to the crime at hand – something The First Cases did well – The London Case spends the majority of the game extending the story in a more linear way, the plot doesn’t so much thicken as stretch.

More problematic, though, is some of the logic in the story. A timeline system in the first part of the game seems to do wonders to help Poirot solve the initial mystery, but is not very helpful to the player. Poirot arrived at a solution way before we did, and left us scratching our heads as to how he actually did it. Blazing Griffin’s last Poirot game did require rather a lot of guesswork to make 'logical' leaps, but the result was a visual mind map of Poirot’s reasoning that ingeniously spelled out all the connections and deductions that led to a conclusion. Here, the mind map has been changed to obscure the links between facts and evidence – perhaps to prevent solving by guessing the layout of the map – and the result is a much less satisfying sense of building out a case.

Despite these minor letdowns, all in all, there is a good enough story at the heart of The London Case, and functional enough gameplay, for this to be a worthy successor to The First Cases and to maintain the (admittedly rather mixed) standard of Agatha Christie games. This is topped off with some entertaining voice acting, too. Unfortunately, the game is greatly held back by the technical standards of its presentation and performance.

The London Case opens with real confidence: a stylish title sequence with arresting, original music. However, that slick facade crumbles quickly. Where the slightly basic models of the last game were mostly kept at a distance and complemented by some nice visual-novel-style 2D art during conversations, in The London Case, the camera gets right into the action and dialogue is played out by the 3D models. The models aren’t bad, but the animation leaves a lot to be desired, most egregiously in the case of lip-synch. Poirot himself sometimes moves his mouth in a way that is not distracting, but other characters, including the otherwise well-realised sidekick, Hastings, can flap their chins up and down like ventriloquists’ dummies.

That is, if they move their mouths at all. By the later game, cutscenes are played out by characters whose faces hardly move, which is actually better. The game leans into its 3D characters and environments but they’re just not up to the level of scrutiny this invites. Other minor irritations include characters vanishing from the scene after talking, Poirot opening non-existent doors to change areas, and his internal monologue sounding like it’s coming from the next room.

Number one on the list of technical complaints, however, has to be the loading times. Moving between locations typically triggers a wait of 30 seconds or more. Given that the gameplay often involves scouring the city for the next talk-to-able character or the next newly-appearing interactive object, this can get painful. A quick dip into one of the small locations on offer might not take more than a few seconds, even taking into account Poirot’s slow walk, so loading times can quickly start to tower over actual playtime. In one 25-minute period of play when we were struggling to find what to do, we timed 10 minutes of loading. When you’re at an impasse and in try-everything mode, the long gaps quickly sap the will to keep playing.