Agatha Christie would never have been able to predict her 1936 detective fiction novel, The A.B.C. Murders would become a video game. Heck, back then, there was no such thing. However, Artefacts Studio and Tower Five thought it would make an excellent subject matter for a game. Agatha Christie: The A.B.C. Murders takes the novelisation and gamifies it, and surprisingly, it makes perfect sense as a playable adventure.

This game has some history. It appeared across console generations from 2016 to the Nintendo Switch in 2020 and now has arrived on PlayStation 5. We follow the moustachioed, slightly neurotic French detective extraordinaire, Hercule Poirot, as he seeks to solve the case of the A.B.C. Murders.

It starts like any detective story with, as can be easily deduced, a murder. This isn’t senseless killings; it’s a carefully calculated, strangely alphabetical series of unfortunate events. On one fateful day, Poirot receives a mysterious letter telling him a murder will take place on the 21st of June 1935, and low and behold, it does. Starting with the letter A, for the town of Andover, and the victim, Alice Ascher, matching the letter of the day.

The art style is simplistic, almost within the cartoon-comic book style, though with slightly off lip-syncing, sometimes the visuals felt dated. While it harkens back to its subject material with Poirot’s French accent and peculiar demeanour and Chief Inspector Japp’s, among others, canned British accent, there’s almost a robotic feeling to the way some lines are delivered.

It makes “reading” each character entirely reliant on what Poirot notes, where he may observe their body language or clothing choices, leaving no room for guesswork for the player to gauge the temperament or emotion of the characters themselves. While the music is minimalistic, it perfectly hits the detective style on the head and doesn’t detract from the gameplay.

As a point-and-click, the task is simple: use the analog sticks to explore and investigate crime scenes and analyse suspects. Each scene has a few notable observations and a counter when each is found. It’s when the puzzle mechanics come in that the game makes you think. There’s a nice balance of puzzles and investigations. These riddles range from investigating a shop till to manipulating various mechanisms of clocks, cupboards and other objects to gain access to vital information.

Once clues are gathered, using his “little grey cells”, Poirot puts together all the clues to deduce what’s happened. At the end of each chapter, a more involved scene reconstruction occurs. There are various “moustache” related achievements to be obtained as a bonus and “ego points” whenever Poirot spots himself in the mirror or while performing certain acts. Apart from getting in-game achievements and PlayStation trophies, they had no real bearing on the gameplay. The fun part is when a secondary run warrants coming to the wrong conclusions netting the coveted “donkey” achievements. The most complex part is the puzzles; while they can be challenging, the most difficult part is the controls on PlayStation 5.

On the PlayStation 5 DualSense controller, I had some issues with puzzles. Getting mechanisms in the right position was sometimes crucial to solving the riddle. With minimal menu options, there was no way to adjust the controller’s sensitivity. It was okay while exploring the environment and investigating, but it could be more finicky when it comes to moving objects. The vibration function was helpful since it indicates important observation points in each scenario. Still, bringing the vibration intensity down a smidge would be nice since the controller goes into overdrive buzzing when finding these points.

The “clue” function came in handy in a pinch to assist when I wasn’t sure what the next step to a puzzle was, but it also was critical for some puzzles where the prompts weren’t working correctly. For instance, on one occasion, the next step of a puzzle didn’t prompt properly, effectively locking me out of solving it. Using the “clue” function, Poirot could take over for that step while it helped in a bind. On occasion, waiting for the clue timer to reach back to 100% to use again was slow and arduous when I needed to use it as a failsafe for unresponsive inputs.

Loading screens were surprisingly frequent; given how powerful the PlayStation 5 is with load times, it was strange to come into contact with them for small scenes. Likewise, there was a slow load of textures and delayed prompts when investigations were marked as complete. The slow-paced gameplay suits the style and allows the player to investigate leisurely, with no time limit on puzzles, which I appreciated since I wasn’t always the quickest at solving them. Yet for this reason. It can feel drawn out at times during the investigation phases. There’s a good mix of puzzle types and instances to explore. I got enough gameplay value to warrant another try for additional achievements; there are even ones for getting deductions wrong or for the alternate ending.

Agatha Christie: The A.B.C. Murders is a relatively short puzzle-based game with enough gameplay variety to keep players busy. For those fans of classic point-and-click titles, the detective genre and puzzles like myself, there’s enough here for you. Agatha Christie: The A.B.C. Murders may not suit players after a more fast-paced, involved detective game. The gameplay is where Agatha Christie: The A.B.C. Murders begins to reveal itself as a worthy, faithful contender to recreate the iconic Poirot story.

Written by: Yasmin Noble