Agatha Christie – Hercule Poirot: The First Cases

Decided to buy this game when it was on sale, best few bucks I spent.
It's engaging, has witty banter, relatively short game play and life lessons that everyone can learn from.
A ton of fun to play with someone sitting on the couch, helping you connect the dots and talking about the juicy drama.
Best play through would be to turn off hints, as they give away the answers too quickly in my opinion. You'll feel more like a detective if you have to use your brain a bit more.
Hope you enjoy like I did.
Thank you to the developers (:

I recommend The First Cases for mystery fans wanting a story heavy experience.
The First Cases is a detective game where you play the titular Poirot, and investigate multiple interwoven crimes. The bulk of gameplay consists of investigating scenes, interviewing subjects, and making connections on a mind map. The game is fairly linear, with only minor deviations allowable.
I liked the ambient sounds, and the voice acting was solid. I also really enjoyed the static character portraits that you see during conversations. In contrast, the conversation animations were not great, and felt very outdated. Same with some of the movement animations, but they are not really the focus of the game, so if you are just here for the story or detecting, they are a minor annoyance.
The Detecting was fun, but fairly casual. In contrast to a deduction focused game like Rise of the Golden Idol, The First Cases is a narrative journey. The downside of this is the game moves at a majestic pace. This is fitting with 1930's drawing room murders, but sometimes doesn't feel like it's respecting the player's time. Lastly, the deduction system was very hit/miss for me. Sometimes the solution was not something that I thought was reasonable. Fortunately there's a help system for when I got stuck, so that prevented this issue from being a major problem.
Overall I recommend this for people who want a slow detective story to play through.

Hercule Poirot: The First Cases

Verdict

This is one of those times I wish Steam had a 'neutral' review option or some kind of rating option.

It's not a bad game, but it's not as good as it could've been.
It's definitely worth it on sale, but I'd be more reluctant to recommend it at full price.

Gameplay

I've included this section simply to mention that the gameplay is not quite what I was expecting. I went in expecting something more like a classic adventure game, but it's actually more like a cross between a visual novel and a point-and-click, with a node-connecting mindmap mechanic added on top, and rarely a 'challenge' segment where you have to select the appropriate dialogue option to convince someone to reveal information.

The Good


The voice acting was good quality voice acting.
It's a decent length game. A good 10-11 hours worth.
There's a shorter, simpler case at the start to act as a tutorial and introduce a few of the characters.
There's a good selection of interesting and likeable characters, some more complex than others. (There's a few unlikeable characters, but they are in the minority.)
A few of the plot twists were well executed. I particularly liked the revelation that the phone had stopped working a few days earlier.
There weren't any anachronisms as far as I noticed.
The period-accurate term 'shellshock' was used instead of the modern 'PTSD'.
Although the game has political aspects (which did begin to get on my nerves at times), those aspects are appropriate for the time period, and do end up becoming relevant to the case.
Completing achievements unlocks the ability to view concept art.


The Neutral

Although it's called 'the first cases', there's only really two proper cases. The second does involve both a blackmailer and a murderer, but from the title I was hoping this would be more of a collection of cases rather than one long case and a short introductory tutorial case.

The Bad

I was hoping that after completing the game I would unlock a 'chapter select' feature to make it easier to collect the three achievements I missed during my playthrough, but unfortunately it looks like I'm going to have to will myself to replay the whole thing just for the sake of three achievements.

I can't even go back to a previous save because the game only features autosaves rather than allowing the player to make manual saves at important junctions, otherwise I would have saved at the start and end of each chapter. This is something I'm seeing more and more in modern games, particularly ones aimed at phones/tablets (which I'm presuming is the case here), and it's a stupid design decision that PC users shouldn't have to suffer.

The game forces you to go down some investigative avenues that are quite clearly wrong, under the pretence that Poirot is making those mistakes. Poirot is supposed to be a well-regarded detective, yet he overlooks details that were obvious to a non-detective like myself. I feel like that was done to purposely make the game longer.

The plot wasn't really strong enough to remain interesting for the full length of the game. There are times where it starts to drag and you feel like very little progress is being made. I felt like the real Poirot would've had it all worked out a lot quicker and been less distracted by inconsequential details. Usually I like a game that has a decent length, but in this case I think it would've been better to streamline things a bit - to cut out some of the red herrings and irrelevant details.

There are segments where you have to select the right line of dialogue to make a character stop being defensive and tell you want you want them to. Fortunately if you don't succeed you're allowed to try again, but selecting the right thing to say can be annoyingly tricky at times (I feel like I probably got it wrong maybe 1/4 of the time). I didn't actually enjoy these sections and feel like the game would have been better off without them.

The mindmap mechanic isn't bad, but the game relies on it too much, and it's not used as well as it ought to be. The idea is simple: You connect two things together and a new node appears if they're sufficiently related. But from that stems several problems:


Sometimes the game requires you to connect together two things that are so obvious that it feels like you shouldn't need to be connecting them.
There are times where the game wants you to draw a connection between two nodes that seem completely unrelated and result in a conclusion that seems to come from nowhere, or where one of the nodes appears to support the conclusion, but the other one doesn't seem relevant.
There are often nodes that describe very similar ideas about the same thing, and you'd expect that either one would be sufficient to make the connection you're wanting Poirot to make, but the game will only allow you to connect the specific one that it wants.
There's frequently a lot of nodes in the mindmaps that don't actually connect to anything, which means that a number of the mindmaps end up with a lot of useless clutter and red herrings.


Essentially, the designers weren't very logical when designing the mindmaps. It could've been thought through better.

An example of a game that does this sort of thing better is Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments. It has fewer nodes, with each node containing a decent chunk of information rather than just short statements, and requires the player to actually make decisions about which nodes should connect and how.

Lastly, one thing that disappointed me about this game is that it's more or less impossible to fail. Because of the chapter-by-chapter format of the game, you're required to find all of the evidence and make all of the connections before you can progress, and there's no chance to get things wrong or miss anything. While I wouldn't like to get to the denouement and suddenly discover that I can't win because I got something wrong back in the first chapter, I would like to actually be the one deciding who did it and why rather than having the game tell me those things as part of the dialogue.

This was an enjoyable, relaxing game with a linear story line and not difficult to play. It did contain a lot of dialogue between Poirot and the characters which did become tedious at times The mind maps where the clues, evidence and information gathered are combined was interesting and different to me although some of the connections made were too large a leap in logic for me while others so obvious that I overlooked them.

Buy on sale- worth the time spent for a fun mystery. But it's also a little bit of drudgery at times with the many many deductions- and the cut scenes could have gone a tad faster.

One of the best whodunnit mystery games in recent memory, a lot better than the last installments in the Sherlock Homes franchise who seem to think that gore or endless wandering in an open environment can be a replacement for critical thinking. Loved the complex characters, the dialogues and the twists and turns.
On the con side, despite nice visuals, the game is very static and which makes it more of an interactive 3D book than a true game.
The part I liked the list, were the descriptions of the clues in the logical schemes, which often made linking two clues together more of a senseless trial and error. You can't write one thing then completely mean another. I understand that the developer didn't want to make solutions too obvious, but there were better ways to do it. Loved the mechanism, but hated the implementation.
Hopefully, better job next time and I really hope there will be a next time.

Relaxing game, great voice-actors, gameplay is pretty straigthforward but what I really disliked was the fact that you never find out what happens to the servant in the prologue chapter who was innocently accused.