Agatha Christie - Murder on the Orient Express

My instinct with licensed detective games is to treat them like airport paperbacks: disposable, pleasant for a few hours, then forgotten. Agatha Christie - Murder on the Orient Express from Microids Studio Lyon resisted that instinct harder than I expected. The studio transplants the case from the 1930s to 2023, and while Poirot checking his smartphone is jarring at first, the modern setting turns out to be a surprisingly thin layer on top of a story that holds its shape remarkably well. The core loop is third-person adventure with a healthy deduction layer. You search environments for clues, build character profiles through interrogations, and feed evidence into Poirot's mind-map system to draw conclusions. The mind map functions more as a guided hint system than a true free-form deduction sandbox, it pushes you toward the next objective rather than letting you construct your own theory web. That is the right call for accessibility, and it means the game never leaves you stuck and staring at a screen for twenty minutes. Alongside the deduction work, each chapter scatters logic puzzles: gear repairs, scale-balancing, a Tower of Hanoi variant with dinner ingredients, a matryoshka doll with obtuse internal logic. Most fit the setting plausibly enough; a few feel stitched in from a separate puzzle compilation. Experienced adventure game players will notice which ones. Difficulty overall trends forgiving, there is no fail state, hints are always available, and the game runs about 14 to 15 hours depending on how thoroughly you search each cabin. The structural addition that genuinely works is Joanna Locke, an American private detective who boards the train with her own prior investigation. Roughly half the chapters switch to her perspective through flashbacks set in the United States, and her sections reveal the backstory driving the murder's motive. The tonal split is useful: Locke carries the tension while Poirot gets room for the occasional comic beat. Her mansion chapters are less detailed than the train itself, but the narrative payoff for both storylines landing together in the final act is worth the mild environmental downgrade. The game also adds extended chapters in Venice and Switzerland that the source novel does not contain, padding the runtime with new locations and a second body to explain. Where the game wobbles is in the gaps between its strengths. The visual presentation has a painterly quality that reads well in screenshots but the animation can look stiff in motion, particularly during dialogue. Reviewers have flagged the ending as a significant departure from Christie's original resolution, and anyone who has read the novel expecting the famous collective-guilt verdict will find the game charts a different course, one that divides opinion. Some puzzle designs are genuinely contrived, the Venice navigation in the finale has earned specific criticism for vague waypointing, and Poirot's physical redesign into a tall, physically robust figure strips away some of the fussy charm that defines the character across every other adaptation. For anyone whose library runs to strategy and systems games rather than narrative adventures, this is not a game about decision trees with meaningful consequences. There are no branching outcomes, no alternate suspects to pin the murder on, no New Game Plus mystery variation. The deduction mechanics are guided rather than open. Think of it as an interactive audio drama with puzzles, targeted squarely at Christie fans and casual mystery players rather than people who want Obra Dinn-style inference pressure. On that specific audience it lands cleanly, and the 83% Steam approval across over a thousand reviews confirms the core fanbase is satisfied.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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