Busy Night In The Calais Coach

Well, Monsieur Poirot is certainly not having a good night. So far, the game is fairly faithful to the book. I went through an Agatha Christie binge a while back and read several of her mysteries. Murder On The Orient Express was definitely one of my favorites, and I loved the 1974 version with Albert Finney as Poirot.

It's early in the game, and so far it's a pretty straightforward point-and-click adventure. I do like some of the quirkier details, however. When the context-specific cursor turns into an ear indicating that you can listen to someone's conversation, it's not just some generic ear icon; instead it turns into a little woman's ear with a blue earring. Hm...after typing that, it seems a bit weird to have a disembodied ear floating around, but that's the nature of point-and-click adventure games for you. Some of the better adventure games will have more intuitive and less intrusive cursor/movement systems. One of the best in this genre was the interface for Bad Mojo, which I wrote about in an earlier post. In that game, you simply moved little Roach Roger around with your arrow keys. No magnifying glasses, no gears indicating a hot spot was available, no little ears with blue earrings.

Back to the game at hand...I will say that the music is totally evocative of the time period. And the cut scenes bring me straight back to the book and the movie. So far, this game isn't as good as The Lost Crown, but it hasn't lost my interest yet.

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