This is an ongoing list where I attempt to do the following: Play, Complete, and Rank every video game in the known universe in order to finally answer the age old question "What is the greatest game of all time?" For previous entries find the links on the attached spreadsheet.

How did I do?

Good news everyone… Over the past weekend I was somehow lucky enough to build up a small backlog of games we can talk about. Its not anything crazy and really only gets us through the first week of April, but it’s in a lot better position to be in then how I felt writing up Ghostbusters. One of those said backlog of games to talk about came about because me and my wife finished playing a game together. Not every night, mind you, but on occasion we will sit down and play a game together that is interesting or intriguing enough for us both to enjoy. She doesn’t want to watch me grind levels in an RPG or play my millionth NBA game, so we come up with a game that we will both enjoy. This game in particular has the very easy to remember name of: “Agatha Christie – Hercule Poirot : The London Case.” Years and years ago, I wouldn’t even look twice at this game, but we have since set ourselves up by playing both previous Agatha Christie games (ABC Murders (96th) and First Cases(130th)) and other similar ilk games (A Layton (69th), a Sherlock Holmes (110th)). While no one else in the real world paid attention when this game got released, for us this came became a top ticket for the holidays. Now, granted, I didn’t know it was coming out… I’m not that close to these Agatha Christie games that I have a release date circled on my calendar, but we did see it on some Target circular and that is when alarm bells went off.

I know everyone is dying to get to the review of this game, they definitely are interested in picking up, but a couple more knowledge points I need to leave here. I have never read a single Agatha Christie book. The reason I am saying that is I don’t know if this game is connected to any previous book, or if (and this is my suspicion) this game just wanted to use the famous detective of Hercule Poirot, so they had to stick Agatha Christie’s name on the box because that is part of the licensing deal. I’m no novice to Poirot (I just told you I played two previous games with him as the star), and I have seen his representation in movies and Tv for years. So, this is all to say that if I criticize or question a decision in the story or a character made, if the solution is “because the book did it,” then that is just my ignorance for not knowing about it.

Let’s dive in.. The London Case has you the player once again stepping into the shoes of super detective Hercule Poirot who for some odd reason is tasked with safe guarding a very important painting on its way to a museum for the grand opening of a new exhibit. While the transportation goes well, you will be shocked to learn that during the event of the private gala to witness the painting for the first time, the painting has gone missing. Thankfully there is only a handful of about 8 potential suspects (thank god this gala didn’t host 50 people), and you will begin your investigation as to where is the painting and who stole it. If that isn’t enough drama for your momma, well during your investigation someone dies as well and it was clearly murder, so Hercule adds that case onto his caseload and the work continues. Without spoiling too much about who did what and where, lets just say everyone has skeletons in their closet and Hercule will find out about them through 10 chapters of discovery. However, it is funny that Hercule is in a country where he has literal 0 authority, and the lead detective who actually has authority basically brushes him aside, yet all these people agree to be interviewed and questioned and have their stuff looked into, when they don’t need to. It’s funny because this story can only happen when set in the past and in another country, because in America, Poirot wouldn’t get a minute with any of these suspects and he wouldn’t have solved anything.

The gameplay for this game is very similar to the most recent previous game (first cases). That is, you spend most of your time walking around tiny 3d environments, interacting with the few hotspots that exist in each area and then talking to whatever people you can talk to. Most of the puzzles that you are going to solve come in two different forms. The first is drawing connecting via an internal mind map, which sounds more confusing then it actually is. For each part of the case that Poirot is investigating, he has a mind map that is where he houses all his thoughts, at multiple point throughout the investigation, you will need to combine two thoughts to link them together to draw a conclusion. So, if you are trying to figure out why you heard glass breaking, you would need to tie the thoughts of “Heard Glass Breaking” to the thought of “broken glass by the TV,” and if the game wanted you to connect those two thoughts it would spit out, “The glass I heard breaking was because Phil smashed his beer bottle against the wall after playing this game for too long.” The other main puzzle is simple questions and answers. Usually when wrapping up a chapter you will talk to your partner (an insurance claim specialist) and a question will pop up “Who has a motive” and you simply need to select the right answer to the question. Sometimes these Q and A puzzles, you won’t have the correct answer listed right away, so you need to find the clue or connect your mind map in your head before you can answer, and move on.

Good news, you can’t ever get a wrong answer. If you select the wrong answer, or try to connect the wrong mind map points, or even try to use an item where it shouldn’t be used, then the game just doesn’t let you progress. Get the answer wrong enough times in a row, and depending on the puzzle, the game might just show you the solution so you aren’t stumbling in the dark. This is again similar to how it worked in previous games, and I don’t have strong feelings either way on whether or not this is a good system. In one instance it helps move the game along when you are lost, so you aren’t just stumbling in the dark, but it kind of also removes any stakes from the game.

The bigger problem I have with the puzzles and logic of the game is that there are still wild leaps of logic that occur that I couldn’t make sense of no matter how much I thought about it. I am ignoring the fact that once again there is never a thought that someone is lying to you.. which ok, the game wouldn’t be able to handle that aspect, but you will seemingly connect a small point and then that opens up a conclusion that you can’t actually prove. In one instance, you find out that one suspect is getting counterfeit art commissioned and putting it up on their walls, but they also have in their budget book that they received money for something (you don’t know what). When you eventually connect those dots, Poirot very confidently says that the solution is that the authentic art is being sold and being replaced with counterfeit art so that no one would notice. I don’t know how we come to that conclusion in an absolute. We have never seen a sale, no one admits to it, the ledger doesn’t specify what the $ value is for, and we don’t know if this person ever even had the authentic art in their possession to sell at one time. However, the game just takes it as gospel and we move on. The problem is that this happens on multiple occasions in both bigger and smaller form, where the game clearly just wants to move the story forward and does not want to bore you with actually trying to piece that information together. Instead we have a whole chapter that roughly boils down to getting a cat out of a confession booth, but we don’t have time to go over how we cleared someone of actual murder.

By making this game “Kinda Open World,” they opened themselves to you being able to go to different locations in different orders. So if you want to interview the politician before the priest, you can do that, but the game frequently fumbles the order of operations and you can have whole conversations in the game without actually knowing what they are talking about. I visited the politician once and our whole interview was about a newspaper article that he was in, that Poirot spoke about with extensive knowledge, but I (the player) had no knowledge over.. Well, that is because I went to the wrong location first. If I would have gone to the newspaper building I would have learned all about that article first and then that scene would have made more sense. This also wasn’t a one time bug, often I would find myself lost in why someone is discussing something with me that I don’t actually know about, only to learn that it was because I skewed off the game’s course and the game didn’t correct itself. For what this game is trying to do I don’t actually need it to be an open world game, heaven knows this team doesn’t have the resources to do that. But, if you are going to try and be ambitious with making this game more open, then you still have to make sure the story flows together coherently, its all this game has going for it.

But by far the biggest gripe I could ever have with this game is the length of the loading times in between scenes. Listen, I am not one to complain about graphics, but this game is at best an early Ps3 or X360 game in terms of graphical achievement, the characters barely animate at all, and each environment is smaller than a single store in the Yakuza games, and yet the load times to transition between locations are downright criminal. It would be almost excusable if whole chapters played out in a single location, but outside of the gala (like chapter 2 or 3), you actually have to travel to different locations to solve puzzles or interview suspects, but in later chapters you are constantly going back and forth in order to work through longer puzzle strings. While I didn’t time it, we are talking about close to if not over a minute long loads for each location, and when you have to go back and forth to hit certain triggers to open up more of the game, you can easily spend 10 or more minutes sitting on load screens for one hour of play, which is inexcusable.

The thing with these Poirot and Sherlock Holmes games is that they don’t really even have to be great to still be fun, like a campy movie. I don’t come to these games to have them look great or to wow me with the technology of the future. The gameplay can be stiff and they just have to hit a 6 out of 10 average and me and my wife can still have fun going through the story together. I play them because they can make an interesting 5-10 hour game that tells a mystery that I want to see unravel, but what started as a surprisingly competent game (ABC murders) has since gone down in quality two times in a row and has left me questioning whether I would even invest in another Poirot game by Microids. I thought the last game (first cases) was weak, because I thought the story just wasn’t that interesting but it was at least competently made, but now we are even further along and while the premise for this story is better, it bungles so much of the actual game that the story comes out confusing and makes the game a slog to finish. It seemed like this game needed another pass on everything from story outlining, to script writing, to location testing, and everything in between. Everything from the twist at the end, to how we determined who was innocent seemed like someone had to wrap up a 20 chapter book in only 10 chapters, and the first 9 were already written. I would not advise anyone to really give this game a go regardless of what basket you fall in. It certainly shouldn’t be your first adventure with Poirot or being a detective as there are other games much better that have more satisfying mysteries to solve, and even if you have done them all and played all the others, this one isn’t good enough to recommend paying for when people are selling it for more than $5. If you read all this and are honestly intrigued to just play a mystery detective game, I would strongly suggest ABC murders which you should be able to get for a song now.

Is this the greatest game of all time?: no, its pretty far down

Where does it rank: I can ignore a lot of garbage for the sake of these games, because I enjoy the mystery and playing with my wife.. but the London Case stretched what I can accept. The load screens, the constant travel, and messed up order of information makes this an incredibly hard recommend even for the most die hard Poirot fans. I have it ranked as the 164th Greatest Video Game of All Time,out of 184 total games.

What's it Between: The London Case sits between: Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch (163rd) and Golf Peaks (165th).

Anyone looking for it: here is the link to the list and more if you are interested in following along with me (this is not a self promotion).Here. I added links on the spreadsheet for quick navigation. Now if you missed a blog of a game you want to read about, you can get to it quickly, rather than having to scroll through my previous blogs wondering when it came up.

Thanks for listening

Future games coming up 1) Golden Sun 2) NBA Inside Drive 2002 3)Pocket Card Jockey: Ride On

Quick note to you and @bigsocrates because I had to fix this in both of your blogs this week, but using quotations ("") in an image you include in a blog or forum post causes the image to break. No one knows why, but just try to avoid using quotations in images.

Also, I enjoyed this game but Agatha Christie: The ABC Murders is the clear best game in the the Agatha Christie video game adaptation pantheon.

@imunbeatable80:

While no one else in the real world paid attention when this game got released, for us this came became a top ticket for the holidays.

But...the other games were below average according to your rankings. Did your wife rate them higher than you did and did you have to sit her down and explain to her that your rankings are objective and correct and her opinions are wrong and she's not entitled to them? Awkward conversation.

Your biggest complaint about the game is load times but you don't say what system you played on. If you played on Switch (which I intuitively suspect but certainly don't know) then it's possible that the load times would be much better on PS5/XBSX/PC, which is something to consider. Not that I'm really excusing them because there are Switch games with okay load times and this isn't exactly Tears of the Kingdom in terms of complexity, but maybe with improved load times on a different platform it would be better. On the other hand if these load times were still that bad on a decent PC with an SSD...well oof then.

Oof.

On another note...having just finished The Crew I noticed it's not on the list. Since it has about a week left before it gets pulled down forever you're either going to have to get a physical copy and blitz through it or acknowledge that it may be the greatest game and we can never know. I guess it will have to win by default because there is no way to criticize it.

Unless the list only ranks the greatest game that is currently playable, which is not how I understand it to be constructed.

@zombiepie: I assume you mean in an image caption?

I don't like young Hercule Piorot. British TV has conditioned me to think of him as an older, fatter man.

I likes me some Poirot and I own The ABC Murders game but it's a shame to find out that the quality of the sequels aren't great.

@zombiepie:Thanks for the heads up.. I'll try to remember and not add quotations to any more pictures. And yes, the ABC Murders is still the best one of these Poirot games.

@bigsocrates: Believe it or not, my wife also would score the Agatha Christie games as average or below average, but they can be enjoyable 6 out of 10s that would never be in consideration for Best game of all Time, but still 5 hours well spent. The problem is that each sequel has got progressively worse and it has probably ruined our taste for future Microids Poirot games.

I did play on PS4 and while perhaps the load times would be even better on PS5.. this shouldn't be a taxing game on a Ps3 and yet here we are.

When I spin "The Crew" on the wheel of games... I'll just tap you to rank it, because I have a sneaking suspicion I won't get to it this week.

@shindig: I think we can all agree Poirot is better as an old fat man... I think that goes without saying.

@chamurai: ABC murders is by far the best one and I don't see that changing soon.. It is a shame that even the inferior sequels have such a jump in quality between the two of them, because this game could be fine if it was just cleaned up technically (load times, dialogue not out of order, characters not disappearing from screen.)

As Always... thanks everyone for the read and comments.

Correct.

Piorot is and always will be David Suchet to me. There's no way you can change my mind. Don't even bother.

Truth. Peter Ustinoff didn't even look right in the role.

@imunbeatable80: I see how it is. You'll take my word on The Crew, but Billy Hatcher isn't sitting in its rightful place on the top of your list for some reason. INCONSISTENT!

Actually you shouldn't take my word on anything because I think Ni No Kuni is a well above average game, while you despise it more than notorious bad games like Adam's Venture: Origins.

It's interesting that you and your wife both consider these games mediocre, but you prioritize playing them. I can't say that I'm totally unable to relate, since I've finished both Balan Wonderworld and...The Crew, but it's still an interesting phenomenon. It's not like there aren't other similar games of better quality (I think the Broken Sword games would scratch a similar itch, as would Syberia), but I guess there's an appeal to a familiar franchise and set up even if the game itself is kind of eh.

The load times you describe on PS4 is just...they clearly did not optimize the game and that seems to reflect the level of effort they put into it in general. The modern consoles have definitely lowered my tolerance for long loading times, but in a game that isn't even pushing the hardware it smacks of low effort.

@bigsocrates: broken sword and syberia are both on my list to play. I personally played the first two syberia games before this series was ever a thing, but haven't shown the games to my wife.. we have since moved on to anime detectives "master detectives: rain code" or whatever it is called. So far that is capturing our interest, but when that game ends we will maybe move on to syberia.

@zombiepie: I've listened to a lot of the Poirot BBC radio dramas via Audible so John Moffatt's voice plays in my head when I read the books.

@zombiepie: Disagreed but I don't know how many people played And Then There Were None. That game was exactly what I wanted out of a book adaptation.

I really wish there were more Agatha Christie (type) games, or at least ones that were especially good. I always love a good Whodunit, and I think they're great as single player games. Even Disney Guilty Party which was pitched as a party game was enjoyable done solo.

I wouldn't mind an LA Noire style game where you could get everyone gathered in the dining room and just pin the murder on someone. And then Scotland Yard is all, "Damn it, Miss. Marple. You get results."

@dan_citi: I wish I could recommend more, but I feel I haven't played one better then a 7 out of 10.. like there is more virtual novel ones (ace attorney, daganropa, master detectives: rain) and then the more adventure game puzzles (sherlock, Poirot, still life). It really depends how far away from detective you are willing to get. Like it's old, but Gabriel Knight sins of the father, has you doing some investigation but you aren't a cop and it's very old school adventure game.

@shindig: sherlock crimes and punishment is kinda like that.. you can certainly put the wrong person in jail and technically solve the case. But that is just you interpreting the evidence wrong, and not quite pinning it on someone else... semantics