Agatha Christie is my jam. I grew up watching Poirot on TV and was so obsessed that I composed an arrangement for the theme song in middle school. Later, I read every mystery novel Christie ever wrote. So a Poirot game comes out with an original plot not covered by one of the novels? I do not expect much (without the writing of Christie herself), but I perk up nonetheless. A chance to exercise the gray cells, perhaps.

Alas, this is a case where I'm torn between thumbs up and down- really, it's a straight up meh.

I confess, it's really difficult to create a good mystery game. You want to empower the player to investigate on their own, allow them to figure things out, not insult the intelligence of people who are good at solving mysteries while putting in (optional) player assistance tools to help those who are not. Really, it's not easy.

Perhaps the most promising non-visual novel approaches to the problem have been Frogwares more recent Sherlock Holmes games. Crimes and Punishments, in particular, included a memory palace interface that allowed you to combine clues in different ways and arrive at different conclusions. It was up to the player to decide which combinations of clues actually made the best sense of all of the evidence. Best of all, the player could be WRONG.

HP: The First Cases seems to have taken some inspiration from C&P by incorporating a similar memory-palace-esque network of clues to be assembled, but the system works differently. You draw connections between a much larger number of nodes, but once you've made a connection, that connection is permanent, immutable truth. The gameplay is less about solving the case and more about figuring out which connections you're supposed to make. If you make the right connections, the case solves itself.

There are a couple of problems with this:

- When the game is telling you there are two connections to make and there are 20-30 nodes, trying to find the right connection can be quite difficult. What makes things worse is that some potential connections seem perfectly natural but aren't what the game wants you to connect at that moment. Other connections feel like real leaps, with very little reason for the player to guess that the game wants them to pick these two points. The game tries to solve this by implementing a hint system that highlights the relevant nodes once 2-3 wrong answers have been made, but it feels like the game is just handing you the (too obtuse) answer.
- What's everybody's favorite part of a Hercule Poirot book? The gathering of the suspects as Poirot builds up to the reveal of whodunnit, right!? Well, here, there's no big reveal. As above, the grid solves the case for you as long as you make the right connections or let the game more or less do it for you. *slight spoilers* the actual gathering of the suspects scene is one of the most boring and anticlimactic cutscenes I've seen in a while.

Ultimately, it makes for a pretty deflating mystery.

Other minor demerits:

- The game spends an awful lot of time on moralizing. That's all well and good unless you've actual read an Agatha Christie book. They largely focus on the puzzle of the mystery and then quickly end once that bit has been resolved. This seemed more like it wanted to delve (breezily) into social commentary a la Gosford Park. Poirot spends an lot of time lecturing people on right and wrong, which he really doesn't do much in the books. He has a moral compass to be sure, but on the page, his primary activity is that of detecting. My playtime took in the range of 10 hours- maybe the devs felt they needed to pad the play time out.

- Super linear gameplay. At not time are you free to explore the manor as a whole where the case(s) take place. Each chapter limits you to 3-4 rooms and doesn't let you go other places (even rooms you've already been to). So instead of feeling like you're getting to investigate on your own, you get the feeling instead of being shunted along the exact path you're supposed to follow.

On the plus side: the voice acting is pretty convincing and the story largely kept me compelled.

So...I enjoyed the game enough to finish it in a couple of evenings, but the investigative systems were weak enough and the gameflow linear enough that the finished product might have been better served as a visual novel, tv movie, or something of that ilk.

There is a subgenre of Visual Novels that is called "kinetic visual novel". Those are visual novels with no player interaction - they are, in every way, a book with pictures and sounds. You don't "play" them, you "read" them.

This game here, despite being a point-and-click adventure, is pretty much the same. There's some illusion of interactivity, but it's all busywork because it doesn't matter. It's a completely on-rails game with zero player agency.

You're not solving a mystery, you're watching a mystery being solved.

I have never left a review on a game before, but I have never been this irked by a game before either.

As someone who loves Agatha Cristie and adventure games, you'd expect this game would be tailored made for me and I was really looking forward to it. Did I expect a life-altering experience? No. Did I expect I would be immersed in a fascinating universe true to Cristie's spirit, sitting at the edge of my seat and feeling like the world's greatest "no game is a match for my little grey cells muahahaha" detective? No, not even that. Did I expect that for almost 30 euros I would get something more than a barely interactive story set in a house in Sims3 minus all the fun simulator stuff? Yes, yes I did.

I have supposedly clocked 10.3 hours in this game. In reality I clocked 20 minutes, then fell asleep on my chair for another 5 hours with the game running. It took me another 5 hours over the course of 3 days and a lot of self-discipline to finish the game. It was a struggle. Not because it was challenging in any sort of way. Not because I was trying to make it last longer. Merely because I wanted to finish it on principle so I could uninstall it and never look back. I didn't care whodunit. Any of it. I didn't care about the how or why. I've experienced more thrill and excitement over Minesweeper. On easy mode.

Honestly, I can't pinpoint what is the worst part of the game. You click click click to move, you barely interact with any object (and half of them are the copious fireplaces/windows/plants, all of which get a copy pasted "hmmm/aaaah" reaction from Poirot with a copy pasted comment "I could spend hours watching the flames for realz/much snow so wow view/plants would make better humans". I wish I was kidding, but I am not. In fact, thinking of something positive to say, the highlight was that a unique plant had a different comment. It boiled down to "man dis plant is uuuuugly" but I'll take it).
The story is generic and indifferent. Which is ok. As long as I felt I was actually needed to progress it in some way and I amounted to more than a sentient auto-clicker.
Click to move, click on the npc you are told, pick the question, make sure you read it before you do, because Poirot for some reason doesn't actually say it out loud (so if you clicked too fast, too bad for you, you will never know what you asked). Listen to the response in either a British accent or a bad French one (that might turn Russian. Is any of the characters Russian? Maybe? I honestly couldn't tell you, maybe it was mentioned, maybe it wasn't. The story is set in Belgium, not sure why there are so many Brits in there to begin with or why the mother has a British accent but the daughter a French one). Anywaaay, rinse repeat. Walk, click, read, listen to bad accent, go to the next place you are told. Connect clues in a mind-map, don't worry about thinking, when there are too many of them to untangle to make the deductions, if you pick the wrong ones the correct ones will start flashing so you can demonstrate true sleuth abilities and connect the dots. Proceed.

Overall the real question was never "who did it" or "wonder what I should do next", it's "how much longer does this game have?" and "are we there yet?... how about now?". And also, how on earth did this get Very Positive reviews and are people lying and if so, why?

As an adventure game goes, it's bad. As a detective story goes, half of the Sherlock Holmes games do it better. Nay, all of them do it better, just not all of them are good. As an interactive story goes, there are many mobile games that do it better and have higher stakes and better replayability. As an Agatha Christie game goes, get The ABC murders instead.

Overall, would I recommend you buy it? Sure. On sale. For less than 5 euros. If you like to be spoon-fed everything and not do any actual thinking yourself. Or find a playthrough somewhere, get a Starbucks with the 5 euros and thank me later for giving you the perfect solution to seeing what it's all about with 0 the effort plus a far better investment for your money with much longer-lasting pleasure. Enjoy.

Preface first - I am a huge fan of mystery novels and games in general and Hercule Poirot in particular.
Having come into this title after playing ABC Murders and most of the Sherlock Holmes titles, I expected more. A lot more. For the current price of 30 eur, this game is a complete joke.

If this game had been labeled as a Fisher-Price "My first mystery game," it would maybe do everyone some good.
I would say it's a mystery with training wheels on, but it doesn't even come to that. It's a "mystery" that holds your hand the whole time, pointing and highlighting things to click.

Let me start with what I personally consider the worst offender - in a detective/mystery game, there is absolutely no way of you getting anything wrong. You can't misread a situation. You can't come to the wrong conclusion. The entire game is literally "walk to a place, click all the objects, go through all the dialogues." You can't miss anything important, you can't make a mistake in a dialogue (although some dialogues require you to "break through" a character's metaphorical defences, the dialogue simply restarts if you get it wrong). Then you combine what you learned in an extremely barebone version of the Mind map, that again doesn't let you come to the wrong conclusion - every point only has one valid counterpart, so you can brute-force it easily if you manage to get frustrated, which you sometimes will because while most of the mind map connections are on a third-grader level, some of them defy all logic. But there's no fail state, so it's just "connect all the things" if you ever get stuck.

The graphics are dated, to say the least - it comes off as a 2011 game ported into 2021 engine. The animations are rigid, there's little in a way of idle animations of all characters. There's no lip sync worth the name. The ABC murders, for all its flaws, is actually way ahead on this one. That being said, I do like the character illustrations that come up in dialogues, even if they don't really seem appropriate for the style of the game.

Voice acting and soundtrack - honestly, I can't say I've heard much of them. While Poirot's VA is absolutely fine, I just couldn't bear any of the other characters, so after the second chapter I just played with sound off.

I suppose the story is okay, personally I have no issues with how it plays out. What I *do* have issues with, however, is the length - compared to the Sherlock games, this entire thing is about as long as one of the Holmes cases, maybe two shorter ones. In a game that costs more than the Sherlock games currently do. It's an 8 hour game at the absolute most, and maybe 2 of those hours are spent walking between locations as there's no fast movement.

To sum up: there is absolutely no challenge. You basically don't even have to read or follow the story, just click all the dialogues and connect all the dots. It's way too short and way too overpriced for what it is.

This game just.... isn't fun. I've played the previous Agatha Christie game from this publisher (the ABC murders) and while it's not exactly the pinnacle of gaming, it's enjoyable enough. This, however, is a slog to get through. This game has 9 chapters, and I have completed 5 (6/10 really, if you include the prologue). For reference, I've spent the same amount of time completing this game as I did completing the ABC Murders, so about 8 hours. The walking is slow, the camera angle is weird, the main thing you're doing is just talking to people and then making "logic" connections that are completely illogical then going back to talk to someone else. The graphics look ok? But that's just the bare minimum, and they've clearly only made one model for everyone who isn't Poirot (there's a time skip between the prologue and the actual chapters of the game and you'd think some of these people would've changed their clothes in the 10 ish years between them?). There's a big area for things to take place in, but you can't really explore at all. If you want a compelling mystery story... I don't know, just get an actual Agatha Christie book.

I bought this game under the impression that would be similar to the Frogwares Adventures of Sherlock Holmes series.

And although this game have a great narrative inspired by Agatha Christie books, it's gameplay leave much to be desired.

Gameplay is very linear and monotonous.
All you have to do to progress the game is to examine a few points of interest and trigger all dialogue options. In the end, the game feels more like a visual novel rather than an adventure game.

The deductive part of the game is represented by a mind map where you have to make connections between the clues.
But its mechanics is completely broken:
* Instead of making an actual deductions you just have to connect the nearby clues.
* In most cases, you can make the right connections without even reading the clues descriptions.
* But I also had more then one occasion when I struggled to find the right connections with the desired outcome being already quite obvious.

Last but not least, the game have some technical issues as well:
* Dialogues in the game stutter from time to time breaking the immersion.
* The game is poorly optimized resulting in high resource consumption which is not justified by the game's plain graphics.

Conclusions:
You might like this game if you are a fan of Agatha Christie books and enjoy the visual novel genre.
But if you're looking for a detective game, you should probably look elsewhere.

This is not an adventure, nor puzzle, nor detective game. It's a visual novel (or walking simulator). The story is quite interesting, the visuals are nice, the setting is cozy, but the gameplay is boring or one might even say non-existent. You just do what the game tells you to do which consists of: walking from A to B, pressing button near things, pressing button near people, listening to dialogues, connecting predetermined mind maps. The mind maps are boring, tedious and many times lack sense. It's impossible to fail at anything in the game, you have to do everything the game tells you and exactly as the game tells you (otherwise you can't progress) and you can't do anything else that you might want to do. Also the game is too long (12 hours for me).

this is not a detective game, its a visual novel with a couple extra steps.

extremely linear, exploration limited by progression in the chapter (cannot skip steps or go out of order), and you have to poke the mind map to advance (it gives hints if you guess wrong enough).

good story, nice plot twists, but its not really much of a game.

A decent visual novel mystery wrapped up in several frustrating mechanics that ultimately ruined the experience for me.

Most notably, the game is overactive on providing hints, and there is no way I could tell to turn this off. If you make three mistakes on the mind map, it highlights what to do next: It just solves the puzzle for you, which is frustrating when you want to try and figure it out with a little trial and error. Other places in the game will literally tell you how best to proceed in a conversation.

A lesser complaint is that there are multiple different interactable objects in the game that all have identical dialogue when you look closer at them, making me wonder why they are points of interest in the first place.

I've been playing point & click games since the late 1980s. This game really isn't even a proper PnC game. There are 1000s better PnC games than this. The prologue is the best executed portion of the whole game and it is interesting, however after this it's a very poor game.

There are too many major points that don't work:

* There are basically no hotspots nor a proper game. Each room has like 5 hotspots in total, and in them, windows, fireplaces, and clocks etc. just give you the same dialogue in every room.
* Can't use or combine any items
* Can't roam freely, only a few rooms are available at a time. At times you cannot even exit a room.
* The game is mostly about listening to conversations and doing deductions. Deductions can be a lucky guess, very easy or hard to figure out or not making much sense.
* Poirot says "ooh, aah" all the time when investigating places. It gets annoying after a while.
* The UI is really clunky. After each sentence, you need to left click or press E.

So, there isn't really much to even really play anyway. The story is alright, but the game is executed very poorly. It might work if it was a mobile game only.

Would recommend The ABC Murders more than this if you like an Agatha Christie game. Or just stick to something else (if you want a really good mystery where you can really use YOUR brains and detective skills, try The Painscreek Killings).