Reviews

• gamedeal user

  Sep 28, 2021

  loving it so far!
• gamedeal user

  Sep 28, 2021

  Loved the game but it left me wanting more... Hopefully there will be a chapter 2 and so on,,,
• gamedeal user

  Sep 29, 2021

  This game has been a pleasant surprise thus far. The game could use some quality-of-life improvements, and I'm presupposing that those who are interested in this game have an appreciation for point-and-click adventures, but the game is really solid and fun if you fit into that niche (I certainly do). The best surprise is how well Poirot himself is handled. As an Agatha Christie fan, I was a bit skeptical about this "young Poirot" thing. My worry was along the lines of this- "There are dozens of actual Christie Poirot mysteries to choose from! Is this just a silly modernization turning Poirot into a supposedly hip 21st century stand-in?" I was very pleased to find a Poirot that acted very much like how I would expect a young Poirot to act, a bit less polished and self-assured, a bit more youthful exuberance, but very much the character that you could see becoming the great detective of legend. I hope to see more in the future.
• gamedeal user

  Sep 29, 2021

  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.
• gamedeal user

  Sep 29, 2021

  HP: TFC is an isometric view detective game similar to Sherlock Holmes series from Frogwares. There do not seem to be any action elements here (QTEs) but there is a mind map that's very much like the one from SH. The story is fairly simple in the beginning and then evolves into a massive web of conspiracy. In order to advance this story, you need to connect the facts using the mind map. If you fail to connect something, even if it's obvious to you - Hercules will not be able to do anything. Let's say you know there's a key somewhere - you can't reach for it, until you piece together that character A is into something, and then that means this, and that... It might be a bit annoying but it's a detective game, not a standard point and click adventure one. My issues with it are few. One is, the mind map comes pre-arranged and you cannot move icons around. This means that in general - connections are easy to figure out. If you have something on the left side and something else at exactly the same level on the right side and there is nothing between the two, then most likely you can connect them. Whoever designed the maps, tried to avoid making them into spiderwebs. This means connection that require huge lines through everything else are not going to be there (99% of the time :) ). The other thing is, the game has a mixed control system. If you're trying to move Hercules using the keyboard and interact using the mouse - it's going to be weird because these are 2 separate control schemes that will be switching. It's either the keyboard or the mouse. Also - there is no run button - HP always walks, never runs. Meaning if you want to get from one section of a house to another one which is pretty far away... that will be a lot of walking. :) Otherwise - it's great. A fun detective game that I was missing for a long time... especially since Devil's Daughter sucked so badly. :(
• gamedeal user

  Sep 30, 2021

  I really wanted to like this one. As a fan of Christie and mystery games I looked forward to the game quite a bit. I sorta enjoyed the first part. Then it went downhill quite fast. I liked the graphics, it is a bit on the simple side, but still gives you enough feeling for the characters and environment. Poirot is in his youth which is different, but a nice touch (although I'm not sure he was ever that "hip" and hunky). The portraits and the artwork in general is all in all what I expected. The story isn't bad either. It's a classic in it's setup and works well for the narrative. The voice acting is ok, even tho I am a bit tired of hearing that broken English after a while. It's fine when Poirot has his classic accent, but when everyone tries to sound like a fake Belgian it gets a bit much. So far so good. The problem comes after you progress a bit in the story and realize that the "tutorial level" was actually how the game was played. I'm not sure who they target for this game, to be blunt it's just really stupid. The mind map puzzles doesn't make any sense at all if you think. Instead you learn to just connect the map in straight lines how the thought are aligned. If you miss a couple of times you get hints. You can turn the hints off, but to be fair it's just random hit and miss for me what to connect. Logic is far from it! And every time you succeed in connecting the nodes you get first a random reply like "I am so clever and good". If you miss you get the same random comment but negative. That gets really old very fast. Instead you feel insulted to hear that you are clever for connecting extremely stupid, but close nodes to each other. If the mind maps was one of the bits in the game that would be ok. Like the ABC murders game (previous one) there where more a variation of puzzles. There was looking for clues, piecing together torn papers and some more. But in this game it's just one note. The connecting in the mind map is the game. When you talk to someone you can't progress without making the right connections. This makes it all extremely linear. Another example of the linear thing is that you can enter a room and look at some stuff. But most are not available until after you talk to the person. After you have spoken a bit the dialogue stops and you can look at some more items in the room (and nothing else). Time for some mind map and again talk to the same person. This goes on and on and on. So after a while of doing this you start to realize that the dialogues doesn't really matter at all. Or to that extent that you have to say everything and listen to what comes back. But what chose to say and in what order doesn't really matter. Or for that matter what they reply. Every lead is added to the mind map automatically, aligned to connect with the other clues. Boring is just to put it light... So... I am sad to say that I really don't recommend this at all. If you can get it on sale for like 1 euro or dollar sure... otherwise do something else with your time. Like playing the ABC murders or one of the Sherlock games, they are far more interesting. Unless you like to read very long dialogues that doesn't matter and to walk around a lot (very slowly), then this might be your thing. The whole gameplay is lazy implemented. If you look at a fireplace you get the exact same sentence/thought from Poirot, same with all the plants, the windows, the gramophones and so on. Why have an icon on those if it only serves to make the game sound even more cheap? I mean you have to click on everything in a investigation game, so why do this? It's just super lame and makes the whole investigation quite repetitive and flat. Such a wasted opportunity. They had the whole thing but the main gameplay going, and just threw it down the drain. If you want to make a game for murder mystery fans for gods sake let us use our own grey little cells at least a bit.
• gamedeal user

  Oct 2, 2021

  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.
• gamedeal user

  Oct 6, 2021

  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.
• gamedeal user

  Oct 29, 2021

  A wonderful new approach to a Poirot detective game - loved the deductions and dialogues. Poirot came over so much more sympathetic to me as player, than in former games. All chars are well built and I must admit, I had my suspicions concerning one fact but not who the murderer was in the end Very good and entertaining game, which does not neglect our little grey cells! Highly recommended!
• gamedeal user

  Oct 29, 2021

  As a fan of the Agatha Christie mysteries I was left disappointed with this one. If these were some random point-and-click detective game without the Agatha Christie name attached to it then I would say the story, plot and setting would be decent. The gameplay was underwhelming because everything is in placed or in a linear way. The game makes sure you where you should be, the order of where you should be, and the time you should be which really takes you off of the whole search and discover portion. 3/10