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Agatha Christie: The ABC Murders (PS4) Status: Finished playing I started playing this game on Thursday 16 February, 2017 // I stopped playing this game on: Tuesday 7 March, 2017
Current opinion of this game
No comment, yet.
March 7, 2017 06:45:57 PM
Finished it! Did pretty good as well in terms of achievements and whatnot, but mostly enjoyed the game and the story. Wasn't familiar with it, so the ending was interesting and enjoyable. Things I though were cool/interesting: a. I liked having moments where you had to go over the clues you'd collected and make sense of them (draw conclusions). Apparently the theme worked well - I guess Poirot is always talking about his little grey cells?. Either way, it mixes up the gameplay, lets you focus on collecting information, and doesn't distract from what may be happening in a scene. I'll admit that some of them seemed "wrong" and on two occasions we resorted to the tried 'n true "lets just try all the options" strategy. b. Supposedly, you should be able to read the characters expressions to help you in the investigation. I don't think this is quite true, and also - due to the cartoony rendering - there's some serious uncanny valley stuff going on. I couldn't really say I was able to read emotions from the characters' facial expressions, but maybe it's just me?
February 22, 2017 07:15:12 PM
I've been playing this co-op with my wife. We both stare at the screen and pass the controller back and forth as we decide what we want to do in the game. We may be trying to recreate our experience playing Shenmue on the Dreamcast many, many years ago. :-) Neither of us have read the book the game is based on, so the experience so far (we're three murders in...not sure if there's more?) has been fun and engaging. It's all new, and while we were familiar with the protagonist (Hercule Poirot), everything else is fresh. I'm not entirely sure if knowing the novel would help or not, if anything I get the sense that it might do two things: spoil some of the surprises (assuming the game sticks to the novel's main plot points, ie. don't change who the murderer is) but also soften some of the rougher edges of the game? For this second point I'm thinking of moments where we're not too sure what a character is "about" and knowledge of the book would help us understand what the game is trying to express. In other words, it would give us a context in which we could interpret and make sense of little things the game's creators might not have done a good with. I'm not saying they did a poor job, because I don't really know what things are "off" - but that it might make a difference. Anyways, for now we're 60% done according to the game - but I feel that we're closer to the end than that. 3 murders in! What more is there? (well, connecting the dots and finding the murderer of course, I have no idea how that will happen though)

Agatha Christie: The ABC Murders (PS4)