Game reviews: Agatha Christie – The ABC Murders and Assassin’s Creed Chronicles
Christie gets a delicious virtual rendering although it may not be to everyone’s taste, whereas Assassin’s Creed just indulges in tired stereotypes
Artefacts Studio
Agatha Christie’s writing – very refined, but with a dark, foreboding feeling – is so inimitable that it presents something of a problem. Remain too faithful to the source material and you risk alienating much of the general public. That’s the only real issue with The ABC Murders, a brilliantly faithful virtual adaptation of the book.
Available for the PC, Mac, PS4 and Xbox One, the game follows the author’s famed detective, Hercule Poirot, as he investigates a murder. Much of your time is spent dawdling around in beautifully designed environments that make great use of simple shaded animation: searching for clues, sneaking out suspicions and solving relatively easy puzzles. It’s all fairly standard adventure gaming stuff, and the story and gameplay never stray too far from the decades-old point-and-click puzzle formula.
Developer Artefacts has captured the Christie tone in Poirot’s interrogations and deductions; in the books, these stood out as easily the most engaging parts, and here they’re rightly given their due. Each question and line of enquiry is offered with multiple options, and fiction fans are tested on their most exact Poirot-isms to select the right piece of information. Similarly, deduction scenes use an intricate flow chart that brings together every element of the case: it’s at first relatively simple, but as the evidence piles up, only true detectives will be able to imitate their favourite detective.
And that’s the one minor problem in an otherwise creative adaptation – if you’re a Christie fan, The ABC Murders is a must, the perfect distillation of her words in virtual form, with enough accessibility to satisfy even the most casual of gamers. For everyone else, it might feel like just another adventure puzzle game.