Agatha Christie: Evil Under the Sun review

There’s about a million adventure games that would be brilliant on the Wii. Imagine a LucasArts compilation – we’d happily pay near full price for that. What we wouldn’t happily do is pay the same amount to direct a waddling Belgian around a static seaside resort.

We can only presume the first Christie game, And Then There Were None, sold by the bucketload, as we’ve now been blessed with a sequel. Well, it isn’t a sequel as such – this one features Hercule Poirot. The ‘sun’ part’s pushing it – it’s set on the Devon coast – but there’s plenty of evil, with each of the guests staying on Seadrift Island having a graveyard’s worth of skeletons in their closet.

The plot’s actually quite good and is framed in an unusual manner, with Poirot recounting the tale to Hastings, his English companion, whose constant interjections change its course. The dialogue’s a bit stilted, but is overshadowed by the inconsistent voice acting. Perhaps the actors were distracted by the poor graphics. Visuals shouldn’t be that important to an adventure game, but they are when faces are obscured behind a mess of pixels and environments are dated, flat and pre-rendered.

All this could be redeemed if there were a few decent puzzles – or if you had a more active role in the story – but there aren’t and you don’t. Poirot spends far too much time stretching plausibility by running pointless errands and combining boring items to make more. If you feel starved of point ’n’ click games then download Strong Bad. This Belgian bun’s best left moldering on the shelf.

Jan 22, 2009