Preface first - I am a huge fan of mystery novels and games in general and Hercule Poirot in particular.
Having come into this title after playing ABC Murders and most of the Sherlock Holmes titles, I expected more. A lot more. For the current price of 30 eur, this game is a complete joke.

If this game had been labeled as a Fisher-Price "My first mystery game," it would maybe do everyone some good.
I would say it's a mystery with training wheels on, but it doesn't even come to that. It's a "mystery" that holds your hand the whole time, pointing and highlighting things to click.

Let me start with what I personally consider the worst offender - in a detective/mystery game, there is absolutely no way of you getting anything wrong. You can't misread a situation. You can't come to the wrong conclusion. The entire game is literally "walk to a place, click all the objects, go through all the dialogues." You can't miss anything important, you can't make a mistake in a dialogue (although some dialogues require you to "break through" a character's metaphorical defences, the dialogue simply restarts if you get it wrong). Then you combine what you learned in an extremely barebone version of the Mind map, that again doesn't let you come to the wrong conclusion - every point only has one valid counterpart, so you can brute-force it easily if you manage to get frustrated, which you sometimes will because while most of the mind map connections are on a third-grader level, some of them defy all logic. But there's no fail state, so it's just "connect all the things" if you ever get stuck.

The graphics are dated, to say the least - it comes off as a 2011 game ported into 2021 engine. The animations are rigid, there's little in a way of idle animations of all characters. There's no lip sync worth the name. The ABC murders, for all its flaws, is actually way ahead on this one. That being said, I do like the character illustrations that come up in dialogues, even if they don't really seem appropriate for the style of the game.

Voice acting and soundtrack - honestly, I can't say I've heard much of them. While Poirot's VA is absolutely fine, I just couldn't bear any of the other characters, so after the second chapter I just played with sound off.

I suppose the story is okay, personally I have no issues with how it plays out. What I *do* have issues with, however, is the length - compared to the Sherlock games, this entire thing is about as long as one of the Holmes cases, maybe two shorter ones. In a game that costs more than the Sherlock games currently do. It's an 8 hour game at the absolute most, and maybe 2 of those hours are spent walking between locations as there's no fast movement.

To sum up: there is absolutely no challenge. You basically don't even have to read or follow the story, just click all the dialogues and connect all the dots. It's way too short and way too overpriced for what it is.