Poirot has been assigned to protect a painting called ‘The Penitent Magdalene’ on a trip to London where it is to be displayed. This is a real painting painted by Georges de La Tour circa 1640, so there’s some factual grounding for the game’s plot. You start as Poirot, travelling by ship to Britain and learning the ropes of the games systems by solving a small mystery, a stolen item onboard the ship. In pretentious Poirot style, you’ll interject yourself into the situation and proceed to figure out what happened as a prelude to the game proper.
This is a mystery game of course and as you might expect, things do not go well for ‘The Penitent Magdalene’, resulting in a missing painting and a case for Poirot and his British partner, Arthur Hastings. This is the focus of the entire game, recovering the stolen painting and finding the culprit. There’s no expansive grand adventure to be had, just a detailed mystery with a cadre of suspicious characters and a complex web of dialogue and motivations. That might disappoint some players but the focus is entirely on deep character development and that’s not a bad thing.
What is a bad thing is the overall layout of The London Case however. Controls for the game are unresponsive and slow with Poirot himself meandering slowly and easily getting caught on simple objects in every scene. Items are difficult to highlight and the controller delays on Switch lead to a number of frustrating moments in what should be the simplest of scenes. The camera is equally unpleasant, pivoting at a jarring 90 degrees with every rotation rather than a smooth, fluid motion. Viewable items are often hidden and easy to overlook due to this and players are forced to endure repeated stops to rotate the camera in order to progress in the game.
Things don’t stop there however. Poirot himself has strange character animations where he opens doors that don’t exist simply to walk down hallways back to another area. This is clearly designed to keep players from accidentally transitioning but it ends up looking odd and artificial, even though it’s useful. Even other characters are inconvenient to interact with, forcing you to walk around them until you find a conversation point. It’s not terrible but it’s not idea either, especially when The ABC Murders (different developer) was so much smoother for these aspects of gameplay and it’s from 2016.
Once you’ve talked to everyone you need to talk to, the game prompts you to start the investigation, which all takes place in Poirot’s head. It’s time to piece together all the tidbits you’ve collected from each person you’ve talked to and weave them into plausible explanations for events and behaviors. Unfortunately, if you miss even small details, it’s hard to figure out how to link various events, resulting in a sort of trial-by-error mystery solving process. That’s not ideal in a mystery game that rewards clever thinking. Sure, you could probably puzzle it out if you could re-read the responses from people but, well, you can’t. You’ll just have to hope the blurbs next to Poirot’s thoughts are enough for you to solve it, or be patient and select responses one by one until you get the right one which is certainly not fun.
Unfortunately if you don’t get all the details you can’t progress, turning The London Case into a slow burn of a game where you have to ensure you haven’t missed anything by turning the camera about and checking every item and person if the story doesn’t continue. If you still haven’t gotten anywhere, chances are you haven’t made every connection in Poirot’s ‘little grey cells’, in which case it’s matching time until you can move to the next segment of the story. The game itself is cleverly written and the story is solid, meaning that the only thing holding you back from enjoying things more thoroughly and with better pacing is the interface and your ability to catch details.
Speaking of clever writing, the dialogue is excellent and quite realistic overall in Hercule Poirot: The London Case and the voice acting that goes along with it is equally solid. Sound in general is mostly well done, and aside from a few instances where Poirot’s voice echoes oddly, it’s a joy to listen to the characters come alive as you play. The sound effects and music are also good and the score is quite enjoyable as the music shifts with the storyline. All in all, there’s a great audioscape here.
It’s unfortunate that that audio isn’t quite matched by the game’s graphics. The outfits are seemingly authentic (we’re not period fashion historians after all), the settings are interesting, and the characters look great, but they also look like the game could have been made a decade ago. There’s a lack of detail in many parts of the game that makes it seem dated. Visuals simply lack the appropriate amount of detail and combined with the pacing, drops the immersion level a bit more than it should. Close ups and cinema sequences look fine of course, but it’s the gameplay portions that feel lacking, like a particularly wooden Poirot version of The Sims. If you’re going in expecting to be wowed by visuals, best reconsider here. It’s too bad because the design work seems incredibly authentic but the overall experience is lackluster.
For a detailed mystery, Hercule Poirot: The London Case just doesn’t quite draw in players effectively. While it’s a solid mystery in its own right, the pacing and controls significantly detract from the overall game and lessen the impact of the excellent storytelling and voice work. There are also some significant load times and load delays that slow things down even further on the Switch, pointing to a lack of optimization. It’s a shame because this should be a game that’s both fun and interesting but piecing together the mystery and even conversing with suspects and other characters feels like more of a chore than it should. If you stick to your guns, you can probably blow through the whole case in 6-10 hours tops too, and that’s a bit weak for a game that’s got a $40 price tag attached to it.
It’s fun to see new Poirot content for sure and since a lot of Agatha Christie’s content is going to be public domain if it isn’t already, we’re likely to see more. There’s a lot of potential here to work some magic and create new fans of some of the best mystery stories ever written. But that fan base isn’t going to come for just average content. Whether you’re a fan of Poirot or not, flaws and all, Hercule Poirot is a decent game that requires some patience but it’s probably best that you wait for a sale on it. This is one game that could use some fine tuning to really make it more attractive to audiences and more player friendly.
This review is based on a digital copy of Hercule Poirot: The London Case provided by the publisher. It was played on a Nintendo Switch in both docked and undocked modes and played equally well on both. Hercule Poirot: The London Case is also available on Playstation 4/5, Xbox, and PC on Steam.
Nate Van Lindt has been a gamer since the days of yore (aka Commodore 64), and has played a bit of virtually everything out there. He's also an avid comic book collector, both vintage and current, and reads a fair amount of sci-fi and fantasy. On top of that, he watches a fair number of movies and TV shows as well. Oh, and he has a family, a full-time job, and lives somewhere in the urban wilds of Southwestern Ontario, Canada, foraging for old video cables and forgotten game soundtracks.