Agatha Christie - Hercule Poirot: The London Case

My instinct with a game this light on mechanical complexity is to cross-reference it against what else is sitting in the genre and figure out whether the target audience is getting a fair deal. The London Case puts you in control of a younger Hercule Poirot tasked with escorting a painting of Mary Magdalene from Belgium to a London gallery, only for the work to be stolen at the grand opening, and a murder to follow shortly after. The story loops in Arthur Hastings as a sounding board and sidekick, which is genuinely the warmest thing the game offers. Their dynamic carries more weight than any of the deduction mechanics. On the systems side, the loop is a third-person walk-and-examine structure with occasional first-person inspection sequences for close-up object analysis. You gather clues, interview suspects, and then feed everything into Poirot's mind map, where you draw connections between evidence nodes to advance the plot. The mind map idea is sound on paper. In practice, wrong connections carry zero penalty, and after a few failed attempts the game highlights the correct answer for you. That is not a hint system, that is a safety net strung so low it grazes the floor. Compared to games like Return of the Obra Dinn, where every logical leap costs you something, the deductive experience here is closer to a guided tour than an investigation. The interrogation sequences that gave the previous entry, The First Cases, a small layer of tension have been almost entirely stripped out, appearing only once near the very end. The nine-location structure spread across London is a genuine plus. You visit a cafe street, a newspaper office, a church, and a museum, giving the case some geographic texture. Voice acting is fully produced in English, French, and German, and the period atmosphere in the background art reads well. The writing has real affection for Christie's world, and the cast of suspects, including a self-important priest, an actress, and a Norwegian art dealer, keeps the social texture feeling appropriate to the source material. The mystery itself, however, delivers a resolution that lacks the snap of a true Christie misdirect. The culprit is plausible, but no single clue reframes everything you saw before, and that reframe is the whole point of this genre. The practical friction is real. Poirot moves at a crawl with no sprint option, and backtracking across scenes you have already combed through is a slow grind. Object inspection points can feel arbitrary, requiring you to click a specific sub-region of an already-small hotspot with no clear visual logic. Progress can stall not because the puzzle is clever but because the game has not clearly communicated what it wants from you next. Runtime lands around eight to ten hours, which critics across the board flagged as longer than the content justifies. Steam user sentiment sits at a mixed 56 percent from around 237 reviews, and the OpenCritic average of 68 from 23 critics tells a similar story: serviceable, not memorable. For absolute Poirot devotees or someone who has never touched a detective adventure game and wants a low-stakes entry point, The London Case is an approachable, well-dressed package. For anyone who has already worked through something like Sherlock Holmes: Chapter One or the Obra Dinn, the shallow deduction loop will frustrate more than satisfy. Blazing Griffin clearly cares about the source material, and the bones of a good series are visible here. The game just needs the courage to let players actually fail.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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