I was awaiting to enjoy a good murder mystery of the famed Hercule Poirot, among my favourite detectives but alas even as I got into the game and tried liking it, there were too many pitfalls which made it extremely lacking enjoyment throughout and taxing to complete to the point of being tedious.

Among the few gripes I had:

- The 3D graphics were neither the best, for a 2023 game released the 3D models were quite non-agreeable nor realistic, the background models may be ok but also quality differs but the human models varied from cringe to bad.
- The premise of using the most well know Agatha Christie novel for a game premise and expanding on it seems great at first, but the Orient Express part became typical once you have known the premise from the book and the effort to expand the story and action with the inclusion of an additional side mystery and new character like Detective Locke, seems great but falls flat overall in execution, it made it more tedious yet adding nothing new or exciting to the premise.
- The voice acting, oh please don't get me started, its horrible.
- Could you at least add a sprint action, yes its on a train but even walking to and fro becomes a chore if the speed is walking pace, more so in areas like in the Venice or station scenes
- The puzzles were not well thought of, its a hodgepodge of un-intuitive and at times forced puzzles just to add this element to a deductive detective game. Some worked, others just fall flat or plain illogical. At times its just like an unnecessary roadblock killing the pace of the story.
- The pacing is generally bad, it switches from casual crime mystery and puzzles to some action sequences out of the blue then to long expositions, i generally lost interest half way.
- The scenes after the deduced the puzzle and clue answers, cringe.
- The detective intuition part borrows from other games like Frogware's but fails to be useful nor actually allows you freedom of choice. The pathways are linear at most and generally hand hold you to each conclusion, there isn't any wrong answers nor any detective work to be done for the most part, a far cry from those of the Sherlock Holmes games recently out.
- Largely no innovation or special mechanism to speak of, if you wish the Last Express was better in this or even the likes of Sherlock Holes, Chapter One.

Alas its an ok game, not the worst but nothing really going for it, the long story line which was padded just went on and on rather than being the engaging and suspense the original mystery was supposed to be. Add in a B grade kidnapping and American detective story into it, it broke the perfect crime mystery. If its on discount and if you are an Agatha Christie fan maybe get it just to try it out. But there are better attempts at the Orient Express mystery including the likes of 80 Days with its great writing and even the Last Express with its innovative real time system and great storytelling narrative with the same material to work with.

Очень скучная, совершенно казуальная игра