Agatha Christie: Death on the Nile
Review
Dust off your spyglass, it's time to investigate a death.
by Marcus Mulkins
reviewed on PC
Enter Poirot (cntd.)
In Death on the Nile, the player is presented with numerous rooms, all of which are even more cluttered with stuff than what you would expect to find in the bedroom of your typical rebellious adolescent making a social statement (or simply being lazy). On the left side of the screen will be a list of about 10-20 items that must be located and clicked on. Those objects may be straightforward objects in the room, or 'more than likely' they may be a piece of artwork, like a painting or package label, that is only suggestive of the specified of the item. And many, many of the objects are deliberately hidden as drawings within the graphics.
Tic-Toc
While you're diligently looking for your shopping list of items, the clock is ticking. Once you've found all the items in the person's room, you then have to do similar searches in from 1-5 additional rooms on the ship. The vast majority of items in this scavenger hunt are pretty meaningless, but there will normally be about 4 pertinent clues to be found in each sub-investigation. When a clue is found, it generates questions that may be asked of that person later, in the Salon. You may Pause your search any time to go to the Salon where all of the characters are gathered. Those characters that may be questioned at the current time are shown in color with a highlight outline, while the others are merely grayed out. The answers to the questions that may be asked (based on clues found) should help you to solve the case.
Between sub-investigations, you will be offered a 'Bonus Round' which is most often the kind of puzzles you're more familiar with from the more mainstream adventure games. It may be 12-16 squares of a letter or photo that must be shifted around in order to reveal the original item or it may be a 4x4 array with 16 objects that must be placed in a specific logical order or any other of a number of puzzles of what I would term Easy-to-Medium difficulty. There is also a Clue Room, which acts as Poirot's Laboratory where he can more sedately examine the evidence that he's collected. It's nice as a refresher if you happen to have taken a lengthy break, but if you play straight through, you probably won't use it at all.
Evidence
Once you've completed all of the sub-investigations, it will be time for the inevitable, "I've call you all together tonight because" - scene. This is a rather lengthy sequence that corresponds to the book/movie's concluding scene where Poirot laboriously lays out the sequence of events, as supported by the evidence. It is pertinent to note that the player will not arrive at this scene until such time as he has ALL of the clues accounted for. So, really, any halfway competent detective should already know everything that is about to be said and what is about to happen - unless he's never read the book or seen the movie.
6.0
fun score
No Pros and Cons at this time
