Agatha Christie: Murder on the Orient Express (PC Games, 2006)

it gets a bit dull with all the tasks you have to do. For example, taking prints and having to match them with every single character. It's just plain frustrating. Sometimes things are not clear on what you have to do even though the checklist is completed. There are a lot of tasks you have to uncover in the inventory for a level to be completed. Things that you have to find are easily missed if you don't pay attention. I've had to consult a a game walkthrough several times on what to do. Also, with Agatha Christie's games (I've played all the games) I don't like the heap load of questions the main charater have to ask the murder suspects. That gets a bit dull having to click on all the questions. They should just make a movie scenes instead of the player having to click on them. All in all it's a good fun game and the graphics are great. Takes a little while to load parts of the game though. Maybe that problem is on my end.

I bought the PC game Agatha Christie: Murder on the Orient Express about 2 months ago. I enjoyed playing the game. It is easy to use and easy to follow. It has enough twists and turns to keep you interested; but not too many that it would make your stomache knot like a pretzel. It took me over a week to finish it, playing every night for 30 minutes to an hour. Great investment for the mystery lover.

This game was fun, but there were significant downfalls to it's layout:

PROS:

Excellent mystery soundtrack

Good acting from 14 of the 15 characters (the american woman with the accent that drifts in and out of a southern twang was the only letdown)

Good LONG gameplay

Extremely original plot

CONS:

REDUNDANT BORING SCENERY: I am the sort that doesn't typically LIKE to play games all the way through with a walkthrough. However after a short beginning, the scenery remained the same through the ENTIRE length of the game. Your character is on a five-car train, (restaraunt car, baggage car, salon car, and two residing-compartment cars). Without a change of things to look at, you will find yourself endlessly searching and REsearching the same brown/gray rooms on the train, ALL of which look identical with the exception of the passengers' luggage atop the racks. Once you find your list of clues, there is a short cinematic break, and you start all over again, interviewing the same list of characters, and searching the same rooms again for the next list of clues that spawned themselves after the last round. If the same old repetitive sceneries and gameplay styles don't bother you, then this shouldn't be an issue. I myself, like variety.

NO TUTORIAL: There was no tutorial, so from the get-go, it took a while just to learn how to move the character, go in and out of the inventory, inspect things, etc., and it wasn't until about 15 minutes to the end of the game I finally discovered that if you quickly double-click a doorway or direction, it will skip past the slow "step, step, step, step, step, step, turn doorknob, swing door open, walk inside" thing, and just allow your character to appear in the next room. Information that certainly would have been handy in the BEGINNING of the game.

INVENTORY MENUS: Combining items is a pain, and without a tutorial or any leads whatsoever, you wouldn't even know HOW to combine items. There is NOTHING in the game from the very beginning to the very end that explains the use of your inventory menus. I was well into the game before I knew that combining items was even possible, and that goes for reading your documents, studying the passenger passports etc. Your character will say things like "I will save this in my scrapbook for later use", without any way of knowing what the scrapbook is, how to gain access to it, how to flip through it once you've found it, yada yada, list goes on...

GAME-MAKERS ASSUME YOUR'E A ROCKET SCIENTIST BY NATURE, (you know, as most PC gamers are...): There is an extreme lack of guidance in certain areas where the game expects you to do things that without any REAL LIFE knowledge of criminal investigations, you would never know to do... For instance, there is a part where you are supposed to make a radio work to contact the outside world. After looking it up on the internet, I discovered that you have to place the bowl on the table, fill it with orange juice, put a small statue in it, wrap the statue in some bent copper (which you yourself had to custom bend from a passenger's bracelet, which you don't know how to do, because of the lack of explanation in combining items, the inventory menu thing again), and connect that to the radio, and then custom bend a butter knife, and pound a nail into the end of it to make a makeshift SOS transmitter key, and then connect some wiring back to the radio. (???) Good GOD!

This game is LOW on the fun scale.

Superior graphics and gorgeous scenory. Game requires a huge amount of space to run properly, or it will hesitate in between each scene which can be tedious. Mystery is not always logically solved meaning strange objects otherwise not considered are actually needed. The characters are awesome. Some querky - some outrageous - you have to love some of the conversations that take place here! There are no hints given at all in a journal - so sometimes steps have to be repeated over and over until the game will move forward. I am used to Nancy Drew, which aside from the great graphics, is very different in the manner of solving, and doesn't have any fun or mind bending puzzels. This game is strickly crime solving. So long as your computer runs this game efficiently, you will enjoy playing it.