Reviewed by Tiffany Craig
The wide interpretations of Murder on the Orient Express in various other genres meant a video game adaptation was an eventuality. This timeless tale, penned by Agatha Christie still sparks our imaginations and deserves to be broadened into other areas of entertainment. The great challenge with that decision is how to adequately translate something so beloved into a good video game. What do you add? What do you leave behind? And will it be entertaining enough that the gaming generation will be further interested by mystery?
In Murder, you are Antoinette Marceau, a clerk from a train company out of Turkey on her way to a big career break. Your initial job as M. Marceau is to escort your hero, the great detective Poirot, safely out of Istanbul and into the warm bosom of London.
Beyond your wildest dreams, though perhaps in line with your fantasies, your job expands upon the murder of a passenger and injury of the famous detective. You assist in locating the fiend by becoming his eyes and ears. Don’t worry if she’s unfamiliar, Antoinette is a new introduction for the game.
Detective work and being the employee of a glamorous train company aren’t exactly clean jobs. At first, as an introduction to the point and click controls and system, most of your time is spent running one errand or the other for various NPCs. That includes a brief stint at feeding a hungry goat and some petty thievery to resolve an argument.
Via a plodding beginning, you learn how to converse, pick up objects and use them to achieve your goal as introduced through conversation. And while these things are necessary to progress the game, their utter linear nature means many conversation choices and items you do locate don’t have alternative outcomes.
As you progress puzzle complexity makes things a bit more interesting. However, some of the more clunky mechanics may eclipse interest with frustration. Your inventory, for example, is a separate right click affair, meaning when you pick up, you have to go back into it to figure out what’s next on the list. Expect difficulty locating items and a lot of backtracking throughout scenes, as sometimes their presence is ever so cunningly hidden. This greatly hinders missions where you have to deliver or reassemble items for Mr. Poirot. Thankfully, the legend does the real detective work. Poirot extrapolates many of the conclusions for you, leaving you as the leader of a scavenger hunt.
While some play is an exercise in tedium, the design and artwork of Murder are anything but. The graphics aren’t top of the line, leaving it more widely supported, but they detailed every scene in the most magnificent ways possible. There are some breathtaking aspects of the train station; sunlight streaming through stained glass windows and beautifully detailed marble floors. Little gold ashtrays litter the bathrooms and dining car and each supper is true to the dialog around it. The train itself is really quite fantastic and cut scenes feature little station guards lowering their flags to allow the train to pass. Voice acting too is unimpeachable, as expected with the talents of British actor David Suchet as Detective Poirot.
True fans of Agatha Christie may really enjoy this game regardless of its faults. But for the newbie whose exposure to mysteries is more Murder She Wrote, it’s a bit of a let down. Though mostly true to the tale, with the exception of some extraneous characters, the right blend of literature and play hasn’t been achieved. A better pace might mean fewer dialogues, more action scenes and some actual control over the story.
The game suffers through some plodding and clunky missions, exposing the futility of making decisions at all. At the same time, it is a nice breakthrough in venue for a universal classic. One that I hope will herald similar murder mystery games, just at a slightly faster pace.