A new Murder on the Orient Express game can’t crack Poirot’s genius

To see a smartphone nestled in Hercule Poirot’s well-manicured hands was only a matter of time.

Agatha Christie’s most famous detective has always been a modern man, fixated on modern conveniences and the architectural modernism of the 1930s that explained why David Suchet’s Poirot was so enamored with the facade of his home at Whitehaven Mansions. Poirot was also bewildered in the 1960s by the way the world moved on without him. But a smartphone is a bold step for a character so traditionally and thematically rooted between the two World Wars — really, I already have a million questions. Poirot is a good user of data? Will he accept an AirDrop from a stranger? What apps does he have? Is he overdramatizing his thoughts of relying upon a machine to work out those famous little grey cells? He brings his phone with him to the restroom?

Agatha Christie – Murder on the Orient Express, Microids’ new playable take on the classic story, unfolds in December 2023, one of very few Poirot adaptations set in the present day. It follows the plot of the novel. Poirot finds himself in Istanbul when he gets an urgent call to return to London. Bouc offers him a place on the legendary sleeper-train heading towards Paris. Poirot gets enlisted as soon as a corpse is discovered on board the sleeper train.

This version of Poirot is a tall yassified gent with an aquiline nose, who cuts a very different figure from the canonically small, prim detective whose head was “exactly the shape of an egg.” He’s mostly the same oddball narcissist that Christie’s audience saw as a uniquely discreet problem-solver at the end of an interwar period full of technological change and socioeconomic upheaval. The gameplay borrows from Microids’ other two Poirot games, which were developed by a third-party studio, Blazing Griffin. On the Orient Express, Poirot finds clues, interviews suspects, completes environmental puzzles, and maintains a “mind map” of problems that are solved by doing “workshops.” Workshops are simple deductive exercises like guessing sequences of events or matching pairs of clues. If Poirot has enough evidence to confront the suspects, he can make an accusation.

Image: Microids via Polygon

The overall detective gameplay seems wildly incongruous with a savant detective character, especially compared to the problem-solving and detective mechanics in Frogwares’ Sherlock Holmes Chapter oneIt felt much more satisfying and substantial. Here, frequent “good job!” feedback screens add some levity in line with Poirot’s penchant for patting himself on the back, but getting constant praise for choosing the most obvious answers in the most rudimentary workshops quickly becomes irritating. Poirot’s painfully obvious segment, where he watches passengers left or right-handed and makes observations about them made me wonder if I were trapped in a tutorial. It is admittedly tricky to clearly externalize a character’s sense of intuition and process of deduction, but there’s a glaring disconnect between the way Poirot’s inner workings are dumbed down, and his outward image as a sophisticated know-it-all. If this is an intentional bit of cheek to show how basic Poirot’s deductions really are, the joke doesn’t land.

What is the real issue with Agatha Christie – Murder on the Orient ExpressIt sabotages the two pillars that make up Christie’s mystery, Poirot and the interwar era in which Poirot lives. It has always been a failure to modernize Poirot because this removes his social importance and turns him into an ordinary period detective who no longer resonates in the world that he lives. The Kenneth Branagh movies are also guilty of this when they try to make Poirot more palatable. There’s a great London Review of Books analysis of Christie’s Poirot formula that quotes literary critic Edmund Wilson: “You run through [the Poirot book] to see the problem worked out; and you cannot become interested in the characters, because they never can be allowed an existence of their own even in a flat two dimensions but have always to be contrived so that they can seem either reliable or sinister, depending on which quarter, at the moment, is to be baited for the reader’s suspicion.”

What the reader — or in this case, player — becomes interested in is Poirot as a formal device to make sense of a world in flux: a post-WWI Belgian refugee in England, acutely conscious of living among the most raging xenophobes in Europe, who weaponizes his circumstances to get what he wants. In Christie’s books and the long-running ITV series, Poirot consistently uses his appearance — pretending not to understand idiomatic English, playing up his eccentricities — to gain the upper hand. At the same time, he is the most famous detective and the unwelcomed foreigner of London. Microids preserves a sliver of this personality, which does its best to shine via some spectacular voice acting, but the character’s impact as an offbeat interloper feels sadly anemic in the 21st century, and at no point are we treated to the classic Poirot side eye when someone talks down to him as an outsider.

Images: Microids via Polygon

Christie’s formula requires Poirot to be a self-conscious little weirdo. He is as remorseless as his creator when it comes to cutting through the bullshit to expose the ugly, rotten truth: that people do horrible things, sometimes for no reason. He is as embarassed as others are, and he’s abrasive because it was necessary to uncover murders in a society obsessed with appearances. The final portion of the game — a new addition to the core Orient Express story — at last lets Poirot loose into the world with Locke at his side. As you switch between both characters, Poirot mostly feels passive and sanitized, and Locke simply isn’t compelling enough to fill his shoes either as a protege or protagonist. The result is an oddly paced dash through remaining stops on the train route, with a bit of “not all Middle Easterners are bad” storytelling shoehorned in between.

The problem isn’t bringing Poirot into 2023, but the developers’ failure to understand how and why Poirot was so powerfully effective in his environment. Why modernize a deliberately constrained and claustrophobic environment yet not take advantage of the time change? If anything, choosing to adapt a less confined story would have offered stronger opportunities to play with Poirot’s relationship with today’s world, instead of attempting to cram it all into the denouement where he actually gets to leave the train. Microids makes some direct narrative substitutes, like simply replacing the Great War with the Iraq War, but you can’t just Mad Libs a different war into an entirely different context without considering how this affects characterization. A successful modern Poirot would have to be an altogether different person — someone who can embody the necessary outsider role, with the ability to dismantle comfort and order in the name of justice, but most importantly, someone whose identity is actively in conversation with the current reality, and knows exactly how to exploit it for a moral cause.

Peeling a perfectly good apple to expose its mealy, worm-ridden core is Poirot’s specialty — a thinly veiled analogy for peeling away layers of lies in the course of investigating a murder. This version is based on Murder on Orient Express works well for crime fiction fans who want to spend a few days retracing familiar steps on an all-too familiar train; there are just enough differences to keep the mystery fresh, especially if you haven’t read or watched an Orient ExpressIt’s time to adapt. The interiors of the train are exquisitely designed, with attention to detail, even down to the cabinets in each cabin. And the voice-acting is superb. Even though it insults the intelligence at times, this is still a more entertaining film than either of its predecessors. But it will also remind you that Poirot, as a peculiar and particular type of hero, doesn’t work if you pluck him out of the circumstances that help to define him and his role in the story.

It did answer my question, however: Hercule does not charge the phone during the night. This, mon ami might be considered to be one of modern’s greatest crimes.

Agatha Christie – Murder on the Orient ExpressThe game was released on October 19 for Nintendo Switch as well as PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5 and Windows PC. Xbox One and Xbox Series X were also available. Microids provided a code for a PC pre-release to review the game. Vox Media partners with affiliates. Vox Media earns commissions from affiliate products, although this doesn’t influence the editorial content. This is where you can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.