Vidjama Gmaes Work

I rented Agatha Christie: Hercule Poirot: The London Case on the Nintendo Switch. Why? Honestly after playing it I’m having a hard time coming up with an answer. Maybe I really wanted to go back and play a point and click adventure game. Maybe it’s been a while since I’ve seen any of David Suchet’s Hercule films. Maybe my brain just wanted to give me an easy rental video to produce.

Either way, I finished the game and my reaction is…eh. The London Case is a point and click game that puts you in control of everyone’s favorite Agatha Christie detective. Hercule finds himself in London chasing down the mystery of the stolen painting, deciding who is guilty from a laundry list of egomaniacal Victorian stereotypes. Who will it be? Is it this guy? Or this lady? Or perhaps even you, the viewer? I don’t know. Well I do, since I beat the game. It was the dog.

Let’s take a minute to talk about the positives of this game. It was short.

Now on to the negatives. I don’t think I need to tell you this far into the video that the animations in this game are atrocious. The characters move stiffly, their game routinely goes behind characters when they talk so you don’t see their horrible jaw movements, and often times their lips don’t move even when they are speaking. The game also glitched out a few times with progression being halted until I rebooted it entirely. To say that The London Case is a low budget game is an understatement. I think this game was built on three interns and a sheet pizza.

The loading times are especially bad on the Switch. Every time you change areas you’re looking at roughly a 40-45 second loading screen. This brings the game to a grinding halt whenever you have to navigate through multiple areas in a row and in the later chapters I’m pretty sure almost doubles the play time. There are framerate issues that cause the game to chug pretty regularly in open spaces, a surprise for a game that looks like this. And I’m sure it has more to do with the developer giving no time or budget to actually optimize the game as opposed to the individual programmer’s incompetence.

One thing I did notice is that the game gets a lot more narrow in the back half. The number of visitable areas diminishes to one or two at a time, many of them aren’t even explorable and simply kick you out after talking to the character in them, and there’s a whole lot less going on. You really get the impression that they ran out of budget in the third act and had to wrap up really fast to put something out.

As a point and click adventure game, The London Case feels far behind the times. Game mechanics aren’t here that I don’t think qualify as “recent,” like giving the player a run toggle and not forcing them to watch Hercule walk around barren levels to reach the one or two interactive parts at a frustratingly low speed. The logic behind matching clues together is often nonsensical, and the game doesn’t acknowledge when you get questions wrong, but simply asks you to choose again until you pick the right button.

The London Case is aggressively mediocre, and thankfully it took me six hours to beat without using a guide. I honestly believe that would be closer to five hours without the time I spent running around trying to figure out the one thing I didn’t interact with to progress, and closer to three hours if you don’t count the massive loading time and how often you have to travel between areas.

And the story isn’t that engaging, thanks in large part to the poorly animated characters putting out the kind of enthusiasm you’d see at a high school play sponsored by Ambien. The voice acting isn’t terrible thought.

Should you buy it? At thirty bucks, hell no. Should you rent it? I’m going to also say no. If you’re really interested, wait until this is at least in the sub ten dollar bargain bin and for God’s sake don’t buy it on the Switch.

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